Heidi: I'm Heidi Burgess, and I'm here with Guy Burgess. We both co-direct Beyond Intractability. And we're talking today with Daniel Stid, who was the Founding Director of the Hewlett Foundation US Democracy Program, which he led from 2013 to 2022, I believe.

And then he left Hewlett and started his own organization, which is called Lyceum Labs, which is also working in the democracy space. And I'll let Daniel talk about what that's all about in a bit. But I thought, since my mind tends to work sequentially, that we might start with your tenure at Hewlett.

I'm curious about how that program developed, what your thoughts were about the aspects of democracy that needed the most attention, and what your theory of change was to try to make a positive change in what everybody agrees is a pretty fraught situation.

Guy: The other thing that I might add to that is I’d like your thoughts on where efforts to support work in this broad area of democracy, defense, and promotion might go, and what lessons you've learned from the Hewlett experience that other potential funders might benefit from and how we might be able to attract more people into supporting this kind of work.

Heidi: Small question!

Daniel: Right. Well, those are good questions. Let me try and do justice to them. And I should start, Heidi, I appreciate your describing the tenure of my time at Hewlett between 2013 and 2022. I came to the end of my term in 2022. Hewlett is, I think, one of the few institutions that still has term limits for grant makers. I think it's a really good idea. And so, I'm no longer at Hewlett, haven't been for 18 months. And I just offer that caveat, because nothing I'm about to say here should be taken to apply to what Ali Noorani and the team at Hewlett are currently doing in the democracy program. They are really doing some thoughtful work and have their strategies and programs. So, I'll just reflect on the historical portion of it that I was involved with. I don't want to leave any misimpressions about me being in the mix there still.

So, if we roll the camera back and take up the question of the origins of Hewlett's US democracy work, it really started with the appointment of Larry Kramer, who still is at the Hewlett Foundation through the end of this year, as the President of the Foundation in 2012. So in the fall of 2012, about six months before I joined.

Larry's told this story a few times, but he was dean of the Stanford Law School at the time. And when the group on the board that was overseeing the hiring of the new president they asked him, "What do you think about the current set of programs that the foundation is working on?" And Larry, in a way that only he can, said, "you know, I'm convinced that the half dozen or so programs you're running are certainly addressing six of the 20 most important problems we're facing." He said, "The only thing that might be missing, in my view, and Larry was a scholar of the Constitution and democratic governance in the United States, is an effort to see whether and how philanthropy could help shore up our democracy.

Larry, at the time, thought it [U.S. democracy] was faltering and said, "If I were to join Hewlett, that would be one thing I would want to explore."

And so, he came on board with the idea of wanting to make that potentially a new theme of the foundation's work, or at least to explore it. So, I think the initial credit and impetus is due to his foresight.
So shortly after Larry arrived at the Hewlett Foundation, he was looking to get this program going. At the time, I was working as a partner at the Bridgespan Group. And because of my background as a political scientist, when inbound inquiries came from people looking for help from a Bridgespan team, I was often on the call to respond when those inquiries related to government or politics. And I joined a colleague for this call with Larry, and he described what struck me as really ambitious plans. But he was just new to the foundation, just getting going, and didn't have a team.

 

So we said, "We'd love to be helpful, but we think unless and until you have a team in place, or at least a couple of people on your staff that would really be the point people for developing this effort, having someone from Bridgespan come alongside you to help develop the strategy is not likely to provide good value for money."

So about three or four months later, he called me and I was still a Bridgespan and he said, "Look, I really am convinced by what you said, but actually, would you come and join me and be that point person at Hewlett and help build the team?"

So in the spring of 2013, I left the Bridgespan Group where I'd been for eight years and came to Hewlett. Initially, I came to Hewlett as a senior fellow, because at that point, neither Larry nor I knew whether there was a there there that the Hewlett board would support.

And so really, for the first year, from the second part of 2013 to the first part of 2014, Larry and I worked really closely with a colleague, Kelly Born, who currently is the head of the democracy program at the Packard Foundation.

We developed a strategy for strengthening democracy, or more precisely, a strategy for exploring whether and how philanthropy could support democracy, which we saw as faltering. It was originally proposed as a three-year exploratory initiative. We ended up calling it the Madison Initiative, for reasons which I can get into.

We first presented it to the board in the fall of 2013. That was about 10 years ago, literally almost to the month. And there was at the time, now in retrospect, it looks sort of quaint, but there was, I think, a three-week shutdown when then Senator Ted Cruz and some of his fellow Tea Partyers in Congress were trying to get the Obama administration to defund Obamacare, which they understandably were not inclined to do.

We highlighted this as an example of political institutions and governing institutions and, frankly, a political process that was faltering. And so, as we zeroed in on where and how we might endeavor to make a difference, we focused on the problem of polarization, which struck us as starting to generate negative feedback loops that were reverberating and were unlikely to correct themselves.

What we didn't know at the time was whether philanthropy, which by definition, cannot engage in legislative lobbying and is not in a position to support or oppose or fund organizations that are supporting or opposing particular candidates or parties. Could philanthropy do anything about a problem that was inherently political, inherently involving politicians and what they were doing within our governing institutions. And so that was a little bit of an open question for us.

So what we went to our board with was a plan to say, "Let's see over a three-year period if we can set aside a certain amount of funds and identify whether there potential solutions to this problem that philanthropy could support? Are there existing or potential grantee organizations we could underwrite that are interested in these solutions? And are there funders out there who, while not sharing our strategy exactly, would be willing to join forces and work in a collaborative fashion?

So, our initial remit from the Hewlett Foundation's board, and I want to give the board credit, also, because they took a little bit of a flyer here. This was new and messy and didn't necessarily fit with the more precisely specified interventions like in the climate and education space that the board was used to funding.

In some ways, it hearkens back to something that the Hewlett Foundation funded back in the '90s, which I know you're familiar with, which is the Conflict Resolution Program. This had more of that feel to it.

In fact, as an aside, it wasn't too long as we got out and got working that we started to encounter projects and programs that had been supported by Hewlett two decades previously in that Conflict Resolution Program.

I think there was some skepticism on the board initially. I think different board members would confirm that, but they listened to the case that Larry and I made, and they said, “let's proceed.” So we got started in the spring of 2014 in earnest.  And over the next three years, we invested $50 million in a wide range of exploratory grants in a number of different fields.

We were particularly focused on whether and how philanthropy could help strengthen the institution of Congress, which we felt was fundamentally broken. 00:09:42.840 We saw Congress as the arena in which the divisions and disputes in our society are meant to be represented, and if not reconciled, at least balanced and traded off against each other. We've just seen evidence this week that that still is a faltering project. [Here Daniel was referring to Kevin McCarthy being ousted as Speaker of the House and House Republicans being so deeply divided among themselves and between themselves and Democrats that it appears likely to be very difficult to name the next speaker.] But we invested heavily in that area.

We were also looking extensively at electoral reforms that could lead to more people with a problem-solving orientation coming to Washington. That was another emphasis early on. We were one of the earlier supporters, for example, of ranked choice voting as a potential mechanism for that. We're looking to build up the field of civil society groups working on ranked choice voting.

And then we also did a number of exploratory grants in different parts of what was a pretty diffuse, and if not sprawling, field of work to just see whether and how we could make a difference.

Heidi: Let me stop you for a minute and go back to the grants that you made to try to strengthen Congress.  What jumps out at me, and you alluded to it too, is gee whiz, Congress is still broken. What were you trying to do and why didn't it work? Or why did it work, but it didn't work enough?

Daniel: Yes. I think, frankly, the jury is still out. When we started making these investments, we told our board that these would pay off over a 10 to 20-year period. So, we weren't expecting near-term results, although now we're at the 10-year mark. I think there have been, and I can send along for the show, notes about some real progress--kind of behind the scenes, in the work that Congress does, that is much less polarized. And frankly, that's a good bit of the work that Congress does, that doesn't make the newspapers because there isn't conflict. People aren't at loggerheads. They are negotiating, deliberating, compromising to get things done. That describes a lot of the policy that Congress makes. We just observe when there is a conflict and the partisan excesses that capture the attention of the media, and thus us.

But what we were endeavoring to do, early on, with Congress is to try to re-establish a concern with the health of the institution as a forum and a body that the country needs to be strong and robust, in which different points of view could be presented, represented, discussed, negotiated, and improved upon.

A lot of that involves strengthening the capacity of Congress. Congress has really beggared itself in terms of its staffing wherewithal, in terms of some of the underlying institutional arrangements that it needs to function, especially with respect to its committee system. So, we were working with a number of grantees at Washington think tanks or longstanding organizations that have been working a little bit in the wilderness with this odd call that Congress is broken. We need to fix Congress. There wasn't a lot of philanthropy that was supporting them.

So when we said, "This is where we're going to focus." We saw that as our piece of the puzzle. There were a lot of other people working on different parts of the problem. But we felt that was a place where we could dig in.

So one other aspect of the early work, which proved to be both essential, and has paid dividends over the rest of my tenure at Hewlett, is our commitment to working with both funders and grantees across the political and ideological spectrum where we shared goals in common of improving the capacity of our system to organize itself in a pluralistic and democratic way.

So early on, that had us working, for example, on the right, with funders like the Bradley Foundation, the Searle Trust on the left, funders like the Ford Foundation or Open Society. And likewise, our grantees ran the gamut from organizations on the left like the Roosevelt Institute or the Brennan Center and organizations on the right like the Federal Society's Article I Initiative and the American Enterprise Institute. And throughout my tenure at Hewlett, we continued to support organizations who had that shared goal, even though they often didn't see eye-to-eye.

It turns out that that was one of the biggest value-added aspects of our work, because our convenings and grantee portfolios are one of the few spaces where both funders and grantees could encounter people working across the aisle with whom they might share goals, while most of civil society was kind of retreating into more polarized camps. So, our funding and portfolio cut against that mold.

Heidi: When we got our Hewlett grants long ago, every year or two, all the conflict resolution grantees, at least the theory centers, got together for a meeting. Did you do the same thing where you were bringing your grantees together so that the left leaning and the right leaning foundations were all meeting?

Dainel: Yes. And that was, I think, some of the most important work we did. We would have an annual convening where we would do just that, gather everyone. And we would have some soft programming. The first event or two was probably overprogrammed, but we came to provide a lot of space and free time for grantees to begin to connect and work together. And we were always surprised and delighted by the collaborations and the joint projects that emerged from those gatherings that we had nothing to do with. It just brought people together. And that made the difference.

It's funny. It reminds me, and this is not the most flattering metaphor. But when I worked in Congress, I, at one point, was in the back as a staffer in the back of the room. And then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said something to the effect of, "Well, you can't herd cats, but you can move their food." And so, this idea of providing in a nice, open setting where it was easy for grantees to attend something that they would want to come to and just happen to encounter people who they wouldn't otherwise encounter there, I think, really provided the basis for a lot of great relationships. And certainly, we know from the grantee feedback that was something that they greatly appreciated.

I think I kind of brought us through the first half of my time at Hewlett. I'm happy to pick up the historical narrative or if you want to dig in.

Heidi: Let's keep rolling.

Daniel: Okay. So ,if you fast forward to 2016, we'd come to the end of our initial three-year budget. And basically, we're going back to our board for approval. And it was one of those instances where we wrote the proposal to renew what we then called the Madison Initiative for a five-year period. We submitted that proposal to the board, I recall, I think it was in October of 2016 and then met to discuss it with them in November after the election.

And as a team, we had that summer done some scenario planning about different electoral outcomes and what that could mean for us. And we actually briefly talked through a scenario and we tied it to some sort of election mishap or a cyber problem where Donald Trump would win the election. And for an hour or two, we entertained that. But frankly, I think 98% of the rest of the country, maybe even Donald Trump himself, thought that he would not be the victor in the election.

So needless to say, in the wake of the election, it seemed like, boy, things have really changed. I will say we had observed, as we had prepared the revised proposal, and this gets at high to your question about what did we learn over the course of it. We had already, I think, started to revisit our sense of the problem of polarization, what it consisted of, and what solutions would look like in a couple of respects.

When we first started, we saw it primarily as a problem of ideological differences over policies. And we came to appreciate, through a number of our grantees, the extent to which it was much more of a kind of an underlying visceral or emotional, a non-rational reaction to disagreement.

We had also seen it as an elite phenomena and came to appreciate that there was a reverberation effect between elites and grassroots voters and that the polarization was kind of rippling through the entire polity. It wasn't just at the elite level. I think we also had seen this as something of a uniquely American or exceptionally American problem.

But as we looked about what was happening in Europe, in the UK, with Brexit and France with the real surge of the Front Nationale in Germany with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany and Italy with the Brothers of Italy, you started to see the emergence of these more nationalist populist parties arising in our sister industrialized post-industrial democracies in ways that were rhyming, if not exactly replicating, each other.

So anyway, so when we met with our board in November of 2016, after the election, we said, “you know this was a real shock. It reflects, but then also goes well beyond, some of the patterns that we were discerning and that we discussed in the memo. And frankly, we aren't quite sure yet whether and how we should proceed, but we're convinced that we should proceed, but exactly how, we'd like to go back and sharpen our pencils and make sure we're not overlooking anything.

The board was very supportive of that. And they also asked us, given the shock, to articulate more clearly, than we had, what are the boundaries of democracy?  

This was another shift in our program. We had, up until that point, emphasized the need to support deliberation, negotiation, and compromise, which we still saw as the heart of our effort and what polarization was not allowing to occur. But our board pushed us, as did our grantees, to define more clearly what were the red lines or what would be developments in the political system that would be bad things, in and of themselves, that we would need to take a stand on and work against.

So over the next basically year or so, we worked with a range of outside advisors, our grantees, a number of program collaborators to reset our strategy. We were still focused on strengthening Congress, but you know with much clearer limits on it. It wasn't about bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake, but rather to have the divisions in the country fully represented and reconciled in a way that allowed for collective decisions.

We also talked about the need to protect electoral democracy, in particular, and started to take some steps to shore up parts of the electoral system that were under attack. And we also recognized that what had happened in 2016 had been occurring through a set of social media platforms to a considerable extent in ways that were really going to confound our goals.

So we, under the direction of Kelly Born, launched a new initiative focused on the problem of mis- and disinformation, and what, if anything, philanthropy could do to help keep that from continuing to corrupt democracy in a way it had in the run up to the 2016 election. So that became the new emphasis for our strategy. We continued to focus on Congress, continued to focus on electoral reform with a new thrust around combating disinformation. And then the board approved a five-year renewal that took us through 2021.

And the one other substantial milestone in the spring of 2020, the board decided that the work that we were doing in the democracy program was so important that they converted it from a time-limited and budget-limited initiative to an ongoing part of the foundation's work. So, the Hewlett's Democracy Program is now a core part of the foundation's work the way that its work on education or supporting performing arts in the Bay Area is also.

So that's kind of the quick narrative arc of how the program unfolded. Happy to go into specifics now.

Heidi: Well, my sense is, rather than going into specifics of that now, let's go on and talk about how you've developed Lyceum Labs. From my reading, it appears to me that it's kind of a follow-on and an elaboration of some of the stuff that you were doing at Hewlett. So, I'm interested in hearing about your thoughts about that.

Daniel: Yeah. And I should say one slight clarification. In the broad sense, it is a philanthropic enterprise in that it is dedicated to the good of mankind and the love of mankind or people universally. But it is not a grant-making entity. It is a grant-seeking entity. So that's one substantial big difference.

But you are right to discern a lot of continuity between the work we did at the Hewlett Foundation in a couple of respects. One is our deep theory of change at Hewlett was that democracy is a two-way interplay between leaders and followers. And the cues that elites and elected officials send to people in a democracy really shape the boundaries of legitimate behavior, legitimate discourse, what is properly subject for political debate, what is not. And our efforts to strengthen Congress were, in part, premised on trying to get the institution back where leaders could be sending more constructive versus corrosive signals out to the public.

When I left Hewlett, I wanted to continue to work on this problem and just felt that philanthropy, in general, was not sufficiently attentive to the importance of good constructive leaders in a democracy and leaders, in particular, who were appreciative of the pluralism in our democracy and were leading in a way that recognized and reinforced it, versus undermining or seeking to simplify it.

So Lyceum Labs is an effort to really fill that need and to rally other nonprofit organizations, funders, journalists to see the importance of that. Fortunately, there's a number of nonprofits who have been doing some stellar work along those lines, some of which we funded when I was at Hewlett.

And we took the name Lyceum Labs from Abraham Lincoln's address to the Young Men's Lyceum, which was the first speech he gave when he was a state legislator in Illinois in the 1830s. And in it, he warned against the dangers of excessive political passions, mob violence, and the imperative for political leaders to help preserve the kind of constitutional governance that a pluralistic society needed.

What we are endeavoring to do in Lyceum Labs is really two things. One is to explore kind of practical ways of getting back to a party system that is more pluralistic. Right now, we have a very polarized party system where there is not there's much less diversity within the parties, which have become quite homogenous, relative to the parties that we used to have, which had several problems and shortcomings, but were quite inclusive and encompassing of a wide range of viewpoints.

One of our premises at Lyceum Labs is if we could get back to a more pluralistic party system, that would do a good bit to solve our problem. So that's one thrust.

The second thrust of Lyceum Labs is to rethink what good political leadership looks like. Over the past 10 years or so, we've spent a lot of time thinking about what bad leadership is, how to get rid of it, how to check it, how to balance it. And that's an important part of a democracy.

But it's also really important for a democracy to stimulate and spur honorable ambition among the good people who are prepared to work on behalf of their diverse constituents to get things done. And our democracy has really been faltering on that front. We know for a fact that a preponderance of the people who are coming forward today to run for office, are doing so out of an ideological drive or push, because they are either so committed to their own viewpoints, or so alarmed by the other side's viewpoints, that they feel compelled to enter politics. Whereas, the people who are much less apt to come forward are the people who are not necessarily centrist in the policy sense, but are more pragmatic and problem-solving in their orientation, who see politics as a den of polarization and gridlock and corruption. And this is especially true among rising generations of Americans, millennials and Gen Z’s particularly. There's a lot of great social science on this, too.

So, the core project for Lyceum Labs over the next year is one we're undertaking with a half dozen or so partner organizations. It's called Leading to Govern, which is explicitly focused on noticing and observing promising politicians at the local and state level who are leading in a way that both reflects and supports a pluralistic and less polarized society from all geographies, all demographic groups, all parties.

And what we're endeavoring to do is understand how are they doing it? How are they succeeding against the odds? What is it that is occurring? We think there are more people like that, especially at the state and local level, than we would normally read about. So, we realize another problem here is the need to reframe the understanding and discussion of politicians in the media, right?

Because just as the old saw, “if it bleeds, it leads,” tends to drive the local news focusing on crime or traffic accidents, I think our political media tends to focus on confrontations, disputes, and institutional faltering. It doesn't focus on thoughtful people figuring out constructive ways to get to a policy agreement across difference, even though that's the sort of thing we need more of.

So, Lyceum Labs is not building up a new organization. It is a fiscally sponsored project. It is a 501(c)(3)3 project. But I'm intentionally trying to keep my own footprint and resource needs light, so I can be supporting the great work that my partner organizations are doing. So that's the spirit of what we're up to.

Guy: Have you looked at--it seems that, I think, one of the big sticking points with leadership is that these kind of balanced, compromised, collaborative, oriented leaders that you're trying to cultivate have trouble competing with the flame-throwing politicians. And every so often, you get a story about how some political figure is reasonable until the cameras come on, and then they get sort of crazy. So it seems that a big part of the challenge is to figure out how, in the competitive environment that's contemporary politics, the moderates can compete effectively. There are all these great, reasonable, people that sort of fall from the political scene.

Daniel: Yeah. It's a good question. And a lot of what we do is focused on that problem. There's a couple of things I would add by way of a friendly amendment to what you said. Sure. We actually think that is especially true at the national level where the polarized and nationalized dynamics really reinforce each other. We think at the state and the local level, it is relatively easier for pragmatic problem-solving people who want to get things done to prosper.

And given that most of our politicians at the national level get their start in local and state office, that strikes us as a productive place to begin to refill the pipeline. It's also the case that the vast majority of the pragmatic problem solvers are not even thinking about throwing their hat in the ring. So partly, it's to kind of get people into the mix.

It's not like they're in the mix falling out. They're never entering in the first place. And one last thing I would say, there's some also really good political science that shows the cost of extreme leadership. And over time, when parties put forward extreme candidates, there tends to be a discount to the support they get in general elections. So, there are decreasing returns to extremism.

Now, I think your basic point that right now our political system, and the incentives within it, tend to reward people whose inclination is to divide rather than unite-- that's not a statement I would disagree with. I just think there's more play in the joints and more potential for renewal here than the field has previously acknowledged.

I will say, and this is another learning coming from my time at Hewlett. The standard response to this situation is, “well, let's change the rules of the game. Let's pass rank-choice voting or proportional representation or open primaries and set up an electoral system in which more pragmatic and constructive candidates can be elected.” That's not a bad impulse. I believe in a lot of those steps, but those reforms are few and far between.

If you look at where they've occurred in the country, you know Maine, Alaska, maybe now in Nevada, California is a large state, but it remains a very polarized one. So, despite the fact that you've got nonpartisan redistricting in the top two primary systems, in California, the state legislature is one of the most polarized in the country. So, the point is that electoral reforms are not a silver bullet either.

And in the meantime, we have to govern ourselves. We can't wait to get the perfect system to start electing people. We need to look around and notice, well, who are the positive deviants today? And what can we do to reinforce them and to lift up their examples to inspire others who would be inclined to lead in a similar way into the mix?

And put another way, rather than changing the rules of the game to get to a better politics, I think the deep instinct behind Lyceum Labs is we may actually need to get to better politics so that the rules of the game can be respected and refined. So, it's kind of flipping the standard presumptions about how to bring about democratic change.

Guy: One of the things that we've been struggling with in Boulder--and earlier decades, I was really active in Boulder politics--and every day, we'd get the newspaper and we'd read the latest story about controversies over middle schools or open space or land use or all sorts of things. And with the nationalization of local media and the essential disappearance of any kind of reliable local reporting, the opportunities for that kind of local civic activism, that is ultimately based on being able to inform the larger community about what's going on, has disappeared.  And the loss of the civic culture that comes out of that, I think, is a big part of the problem. How does that fit into what you're trying to do and how we can restore local news?

Daniel: Yes. Fully agree and endorse your assessment of the problem. I think the polarization of our politics has unfolded hand-in-glove with the nationalization of our politics. And if we want to depolarize our politics, I think there's no choice but to endeavor to relocalize our politics. I think revitalizing the older and frankly, no longer economic, forms of local journalism is not the answer. But finding some way to reinvigorate local civic cultures and local awareness of what's occurring, I think, is really important.

There is this new $500 million initiative that a number of foundations have recently committed to. I think that will be a big help. It’s called the Press Forward Initiative.

There's also some really interesting work that's been led by Darryl Holliday at City Bureau in Chicago. A slightly different approach taken by Richard Young and the CivicLex team in Lexington, Kentucky, where you have civic civil society organizations working to connect people with the challenges facing their community and to share information about it in a constructive and useful way. That isn't necessarily local journalism per se, but it is endeavoring to rekindle those local civic ties that I think are the ultimate basis for a healthy politics and democracy.

So, Guy, I think it's a really good point. Part of the reason we're frankly starting the work with the Leading Government Project at Lyceum Labs, focusing on the local and state level is because we find that a more fertile seedbed for the kind of politicians we think we need more of. Whether and how that can be brought up to Washington is, I think, an open question. So that's all just a long-winded way of saying I agree with your premise there.

And so, we're quite clear that we're focused on one particular part of the problem but are acknowledging that this is a theory of change for which our part is one particular theory of action.

Guy: Can you think of other initiatives like the ones that you just mentioned where other people and other groups are picking up big parts of the problem that we could help make more people aware of?

Daniel: Yes. I think there's a few different efforts underway. I mentioned the Press Forward Initiative and thinking about local journalism and local civic information and how to revitalize that. The New Pluralist Collaborative, which was an effort that I helped join forces with a number of other funders and field builders to help start, I think, also holds a great deal of promise and is illuminating what it would take to really have a pluralistic multi-ethnic society and democracy and how to preserve that. So, I see that as something that shows promise.

Another important new initiative is the Trust for Civic Infrastructure, which emerged out of the Our Common Purpose Report. A number of funders have been working to stand up an effort to build civic infrastructure. They're going to emphasize, in particular, small town and rural America, which typically doesn't have the philanthropic support and civic infrastructure that some of our urban centers do. That effort should come online later this year. I see that as really important because it's building up the civic places and the civic culture that are not designed to bring about any particular policy outcome, but are available for citizens and people living in particular places to use and to work in together. I think that shows great promise. And it's frankly correcting, I think, decades of underinvestment by philanthropy in spaces like that.

And then finally, there's a project that the Pew Trust are spearheading around a kind of a nonpartisan long-run effort to bolster our election systems in a way that is taking, again, this longer-term perspective and is not going to be pulled into the controversies that tend to surround near-term interventions in the electoral process within a given electoral cycle.

So those would be a few that are, I think, where philanthropy is recognizing the need to raise its sights a little bit more on the time horizon out into the future.

Heidi: This conversation made me think of your article that responded to an article that was written in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that was about philanthropic pluralism. There were six funders that made a statement that they thought that philanthropy should be pluralistic and should entertain funders and accept funders coming from all sides of the political spectrum. That generated a whole lot more heat than I expected. And that's where we first ran across you, I think, is that we saw your response to that and really liked it and published a summary of that on our blog. Where is that going now? It strikes me that that was a really important discussion, and it relates to a debate that we've gotten into with a number of our colleagues on our blog where there's a real distinction or division between the people who are coming from a very partisan point of view. We mostly hang out with folks on the left, so we're hearing all these arguments about how you have to defend justice. And the problem with democracy is the conservatives who are against democracy. And then there's folks like us who are saying, coming from a conflict resolution point of view, saying, "You can't write off half of the country. We've got to figure out ways to work together." And some people have been supporting us, and some people have really been dumping on us, saying that that view isn't legitimate. And we recently came up with a post where we tried to reframe this discussion in terms of what we call power-over or power-with democracy.

So, the notion is that the folks who think that the problem with democracy is the other guys are taking a power-over approach. We're advocating a power-with approach where if we all work together, we can have more power to solve more problems. But still, I thought we had a really convincing case and found out we didn't, because we're still getting lots of pushback on that.

Daniel: Well, no, it's a really good question. And I think I'm in your camp. I come at things probably a bit more from the center-right point of view, but see the need for and I think originally read that article on philanthropic pluralism that you mentioned as a real ray of hope and saw it as, frankly, a restatement of a historical and venerable and I think still spot-on view for, under what circumstances can philanthropy, which is this kind of private accumulations of wealth that are spent for public purposes. How can that be justified in a free society if it isn't being conducted on a pluralistic basis and reinforcing pluralism? And I think the response I wrote really was partly to lift up the article, the op-ed. And in full disclosure, I had several friends from institutions that I'd worked with that had signed on to that.

But it was also to note what I saw as an almost uncanny symmetry in the vociferous attacks on that philanthropic pluralism argument that came from what I would call the “social justice left,” and someone who is a real unreconstructed right-of-center person who served in the Trump administration. Both of whom kind of took to task philanthropic pluralism in ways that were, frankly, the mirror image of each other's arguments. And to me, showed a society in which they presumed that pluralism is not the goal, but the goal is for their substantive conception of what a good society looks like wins out and frankly dominates anyone who doesn't sign up for that. And I find that as objectionable coming from social justice warriors, as I do from unreconstructed right-of-center types, even though I tend to be more on the right.

And what I tried to do in the piece was just call out the rejection of pluralism as a fundamental problem in our diverse society. And also, frankly, the spirit of antagonism and hopelessness, a lack of optimism that showed up in both of these critiques. And what's really, in particular, the most intense criticism leveled, not so much against the other side, but against people who are, in theory, allied with you, but you see as wavering or collaborating in their commitment to your intensely held social views. And I just think that that points the way to a society that's not the kind of one that I want to live in, or that I think would work for the country.

So, I have two other perspectives on this problem. One is, as someone who grew up on a family farm in rural Michigan, in what is now in the heart of Trump country, or Deep Red America, but who has spent most of his adult life living and working in deep blue places and deep blue institutions, I've just come to see that there is so much more--and I also should mention that I serve on the board of an organization called More in Common, which is a terrific organization and really is all about highlighting the extent to which we see things eye to eye. And I will say, having deep roots in both red America and blue America, I just think so much of these ostensible fundamental conflicts are manufactured by elites and institutions, some of which I've served in, some of which you see when you open up the newspaper that we have much more in common. And sure, we might disagree on particularities. But there's much more that unites us than divides us. But for people who are, as Amanda Ripley would say, determined to be conflict entrepreneurs that get their power and influence by stirring up conflict, to say that is anathema.

The other thing I would say, and this is an observation I have where I think the two sides are, broadly speaking, and I don't like to say the two sides because that reifies a construct, which I think is truly an artificial construct. But I think there's an extent to which people on different sides of this controversy are talking past each other to an extent.

And by that, I think the people on the progressive left are, I think, rightly alarmed by what they see as a subset of Republicans, although they tend to paint with a broad brush, undermining some of the most common and sacrosanct institutions of democracy, of which the events of January 6th stirred up by then sitting president of the United States is exhibit one.  They say, "Whatever it takes, we have to stop that –our democracy is under attack."

I think if you define democracy as strictly about the control of our political and governing institutions, then you can say, "There's one group threatening democracy. It is this leader and this party, and we need to pull out all the stops to confront them."

I view that democracy is much more holistic. It involves not simply our government and politics, but our society, our economy. It covers the geography of the country. And it covers our cultural institutions.

And I think the blind spot of the social justice people dedicated to social justice and racial justice at institutions in the foundation world, in the media world, in the cultural world, and certainly in higher education, is they really have a lock on the commanding heights of that part of our society. And they are shaping and constraining the legitimate realms of discourse within it in ways that are really pernicious for democracy and disrespectful of roughly the two-thirds of the country that isn't college, hyper-educated, and participating in that.

And there is a dismissal and a contempt that is not always, but sometimes, and I think increasingly articulated outright in those circles, which is also, I think, a direct assault on our democracy and certainly on the kind of the pluralistic, multi-ethnic democratic patterns that we need to see.

So, I think I see the point in logic about the alarm bells being expressed on each side. I continue to think there is potential to reclaim, to both recognize and see the considerable common ground that exists, but I understand the forces that are working to undermine it. So, I'm kind of an ally with you in trying to hold space for something other than these intemperate and completely unpluralistic attempts to render the other side into submission. But that is a growing problem.

Heidi: Totally agree. And I've got lots of comments and questions that I could ask about that. But I'm looking at the clock and realizing that we've come close to covering an hour. So I want to honor your time and not make you keep talking.

Daniel: Well, I feel like my throat has recovered, so I'm happy to go on for a bit if you have other questions for me. And presuming you can just get the greatest hits here in the video.

Okay. The one thing that really came to my mind as you were saying that is that we've come to realize that there isn't any consensus, and we really haven't found any documents--you might know of more, being a political scientist. That's not our background. But we're trying to figure out what are the values that define democracy. Most people tend to think of democracy just simply as elections.

And if you frame democracy as being free and fair elections, then, of course, you're going to be very alarmed about January 6th. Or if you're a Republican, you're very alarmed because what happened appeared to be very odd because Trump had a lead for a long, long, long time. And then suddenly, that lead disappeared. And a logical conclusion could be that, well, votes were stolen or manufactured or whatever it is.

But there's so much more to democracy than elections. So, we're trying to think out, well, what else is it? How do you define democracy? What are the key elements of it in addition to elections that need to be supported?

Guy: There's all this stuff about you know the norms of democracy are eroding. But I did a Google search and tried to find a list of the norms of democracy. And there really isn't one, at least that’s very clear. And there's a lot of people who seem to think of democracy as a nonviolent set of rules through which you can fight for justice. And if you put together a big enough power base, you can impose others or you can help bend the arc of history in the right direction.

And that's very different from a definition of democracy as a system of coexistence and mutual tolerance that allows very different cultural groups with very different and often competing beliefs to live together in peace and a certain amount of mutual support.

Daniel: Yeah. So really good question. I think one of the kinds of misconceptions is the prevalence of an overly narrow focus on democracy as really centering on government and politics and elections and a particular limited conception of democracy even within that framework.  And so Guy, to pick out on the point you just made, there was a great political scientist, Arend Lijphart, a Dutch political scientist who wrote a number books. I read his book when it was called Democracies: Patterns of Governance in Democratic Societies. He went on to write two or three more examples of this with different titles. But his basic premise is there's a couple of ways of organizing the electoral and political and governmental institutions of a democracy. You can organize it as a pure kind of Westminster-style parliamentary system of, say, you might see in New Zealand or Canada or maybe the UK, although maybe less the UK these days, where the goal is you hold an election and then the governing party then can do anything it wants to implement its mandate until the next election. So, this kind of majoritarian, if we win, then we can do everything we want is one way of organizing a democracy. It's kind of a majoritarian outcome-driven. That tends to work for societies that are quite homogeneous and don't really have a lot of pluralistic or diverse elements within it.

In other types of societies, like Lijphart's native Netherlands or I would argue the United States or other divided societies, they are what he called more consociational democracies that need, Guy, to your point, a set of electoral institutions and political and governing arrangements that distribute and disperse power and avoid any one side from getting the upper hand and running the table.

And the United States was really set up to be much more of that consociational style democracy. To be clear, the founders believed in the ultimate rule of majorities, but those majorities had to be sufficiently broad and deep and sustained to make our complex array of institutions, the separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, work well throughout that institutional complexity.

So, I think I would go with Lijphart,’s kind of dual conception of democracy and think about which conception is right for us. I would go further, and to pick up on what we just talked about, is to expand our understanding of democracy from beyond merely formal political and governmental domains to include the domain of culture and economy and society. And do we look upon our fellow citizens with a modicum of respect that they deserve as fellow free and equal citizens in the country? Or do we look upon them with disdain or a profound disrespect?  And I recently wrote a short post talking about the need to reframe democracy to take into account this broader conception of citizenship so to see us as participants in democracy, not simply as voters whose side is winning or losing or getting to do what we want them to do or not in politics, but also to see ourselves as citizens with a variety of responsibilities of which voting is only one of them.

And one of those responsibilities is to look with a modicum of respect among fellow citizens who see the world differently. And I ended up quoting and this to me, if someone said, "What's the definition of democracy?" I closed that blog post off by noting the great paragraph that E.B. White wrote in The New Yorker. And I think it was 1943. The Writers War Board sent a note out saying, "Okay, we're in the middle of a global war against fascism and militarism. We probably should think about what is democracy like." And he wrote a paragraph, which I quoted in this piece, because his definition of democracy has one mention, of not even elections, but privacy in the voting booth, but all the other elements of democracy for him were about culture, about our experience of being in society, in particular communities with fellow Americans. And I think our conception of democracy has shifted from what, at the time, was a much more pervasive and broadly cultural and social and economic view of it, to something that is quite narrowly and technically about politics and government. And I don't think our democracy has become more stable as that focus has narrowed.

Heidi: You reminded me that I should have said in the introduction that you have an amazing blog.  It’s called The Art of Association. And I hope that anybody who's watching this or reading this will check it out. I've been reading it and really appreciating everything you've been putting in there.

Daniel: Thank you. And likewise, it's been wonderful to plug into the blog and the rich set of resources that the two of you curate. So I'm grateful for what you do also.

Heidi: Well, thank you much. Guy, do you have any other questions at this point?

Guy: Not immediately. I mean, there's a lot here to think about. And there are a lot of, I think, big ideas that we want to highlight, especially in the post on this as we go forward. I think the notion of the parliamentary vision of sort of winner-take-all democracy, but for a limited period of time until the next election rolls around, And one that has a lot more interplay is a very important one that isn't, I think, widely understood.

Daniel: Yes, yes. And just if I can, one last comment. Just to show you how deep this misconception is, in the controversy over the speaker [of the U.S. House of Representatives] and the motion to vacate, you heard this real tension between a number of Republicans, including quite conservative Tea Party Republicans like Thomas Massey of Kentucky saying, “Speaker McCarthy promised a return to a more regular, open order and discussion, and he's provided that. We may not like the outcomes, but he has opened up the House and let it work its will in ways that we have been calling for.”

And others are saying, "Well, we want regular order and we want dramatic cuts in budgets, even though they aren't able to generate the votes for those budget cuts, even within their own Republican Party." So that notion of, "Well, we were elected to do what we want to do and  to hell with what anyone else who sees the world differently thinks." That is very much a kind of a parliamentary logic that might work in New Zealand and is fully appropriate for the New Zealand political system, but is, again, completely in contradiction to the arrangement of our institutions, which are set up to kind of force different perspectives to hammer out solutions that work for all the relevant parties needed to get to a majority.

Heidi: I find your distinction interesting, because Guy came up with a line a long time ago that I was expecting you to mention--the 51% hammer effect” was his term for it. And what it appeared to us, again, being non-political scientists, is that one side would aim to get 51% of the votes in order to be able to win the presidency. And then if you win the presidency, the goal appears to us to be to hammer through as many of your policies as you possibly can.  And if the Congress won't go along, then you do it with executive orders, and you get as much of your way as you can until you get thrown out on your ear. So I see that as happening in the United States as well as happening in parliamentary systems. And this balance and the thing that really dismays me about what we're witnessing in Congress now, but it's not new, we’ve been seeing it for a long time, is what clearly seems to be a greater concern for the political side that people are on, rather than a concern either for the country or for the institution. And they're taking both down because of these really extreme views. And at the moment, it's happening on the conservative side, but it could just as easily happen on the left.

Daniel: Yes. And I would say in most of the large institutional foundations and most of the institutions of higher education and most of the prominent media companies and kind of cultural apparatus in Los Angeles, you have a similar outlook, except it's oriented towards the left. So again, I think if you open up, we have conflict between left and right in multiple dimensions. And if one side has an upper hand and is really dominating in one of those dimensions, that doesn't mean that in another dimension, which in the long run might have more of an impact on our democracy, the other side has the upper hand.

Heidi: Well, there seem to be problems yet to be solved.

Daniel: Yes, yes. Well, really good to speak with both of you. I appreciate what you're doing. And let me know, by the way, if there's any more follow-up or any of my throat problems caused issues, I'm happy to I don't know if I can reprise the exact sunlight in the background here, but I'm happy to put on this shirt again and rejoin you for a follow-up.

Heidi: Well, we might want to do a follow-up, but I think your throat issues didn't have anything to do with it.

So, thank you very much. We really appreciated everything you have to say. I'm so delighted that we've met you and are learning about what you're doing and hope we can continue our conversations.

Daniel: Yeah!