Heidi and Guy Burgess talk with Gideon Lichfield

Heidi Burgess: Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability. And I have with me Guy Burgess, my partner, and Gideon Lichfield, who is an eminent journalist and media entrepreneur, and what he calls on his LinkedIn page a  "Democracy Futurist." And that's one of the things that we're really interested in talking to him about, because he's thinking about how journalism and tech influences democracy and what things we can do to try to make our democracy more successful in the future — because we all agree that it isn't too successful right now. So we were really excited that Gideon was willing to spend some time with us. I guess I'd like to get you to start by telling us a little bit about your background. You've had some really important journalist positions, and then you made, in my mind, a bit of a left turn (or maybe it was right turn) over to democracy. So tell us about that and tell us more about what you're doing now.

Gideon: Sure. So first, thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here. So I wouldn't say I took a left turn or a right turn. It's more been like zigzagging. Starting out, I studied physics and philosophy in college. I got my first job, a journalistic job as a science writer at The Economist. And then after a couple of years, they had an opening in their Mexico City Bureau, and I wanted to go abroad. So I took that. And so, for the next decade or so, I went from one foreign bureau to another.I was in Mexico City, then in Moscow, then in Jerusalem.

And then I came to the US, which was 17 years ago. And in the US, I worked for the Economist a little more. And I worked for another news website. Then I went to MIT Technology Review and then to Wired. So I had this career that sort of started out in science and tech, went into international affairs and foreign policy, and then gradually came back to tech.

When I look back on that time that I spent as a foreign correspondent it is important to keep in mind that I grew up in the '70s and '80s.  I was 18 when the Berlin Wall came down. And so I'm very much of that generation that grew up on the notion that after the Soviet Union fell, democracy had won. Everything was going to be great from now on.

And so I'm also a generation that was disappointed when that turned out not to be the case. And I think that when I was doing my stuff as a foreign correspondent.  In retrospect, in some way or another, I was asking the question, "All right. democracy has won, but how long is it going to take to actually appear? What's holding it back in all of these different countries?" Which, in retrospect, is maybe kind of a naive way to approach those jobs. But I think, in some way, that was my underlying animating question. 

And then I got to the US. After a few years in the US, I started to realize that, like we all did, that democracy here was not in such great shape either. And so I became very interested in the question of what is wrong with democracy as a system? Why is it dysfunctional everywhere? What are its shortcomings? And that led me to the question of, "well, we have these so-called "democratic systems" —  I'll talk more about why I say "so-called" in a bit, but so-called democratic systems that have their origins centuries ago. And I think that has a lot to do with why they don't work so well today. So I started asking myself the question, "If you were to design something that had the goals of being democratic today, what would that look like?" So that led me down this path of trying to investigate what would it look like to reinvent democracy.

I started following that question back when I was at MIT Technology Review. so shortly after Trump got elected the first time. And it's been an interest of mine ever since. So when I left Wired about two and a half years ago, I decided that I wanted to devote myself for a while to that topic. What would it look like to reinvent democracy now, and who are the people who are actually doing it on the ground?

Heidi: Why do you say "so-called democracy."

Gideon: We should remember that the systems that we have today in which there is universal suffrage and many safeguards of liberal democracy, and checks and balances, and all these institutions were very, very gradually cobbled together over a very, very long time.

In the UK, people generally trace the beginning of democracy to the Magna Carta, which was, what, 1,000 years ago now, roughly? King John very, very reluctantly gave up some of his power to the nobility. And it has been this continuous process of the power centers reluctantly ceding more and more power to other actors over time.

As we also all know, when the US was founded, the founders did not like the term "democracy." They associated the word "democracy" with Athenian democracy, which in their view had been a terrible disaster, and lent itself to mob rule. The very idea of the "republic" that they created was meant to temper the passions of the mob and create these institutions that moved slowly and allowed deliberation and allowed the intelligent people to make their decisions. And, of course, voting in those days was extremely restricted. I think in most states at the time, it was only white male landowners who could vote. It wasn't until Andrew Jackson [in the 1830s] that that franchise started to be expanded meaningfully, first just among white men. And then, of course, we know the processes by which the vote was gradually extended to everyone, or almost everyone— not people in prison, for example.

So when we talk about democracy today, and how we have democracy, we tend to forget that history. We tend to forget the fact that the system that we have wasn't designed to be a democracy in the first place. It was designed to create a reasonable, deliberative process among a certain elite of people who were judged to be capable of the kind of decision-making that was required to run a democracy. So everything that we have now was bolted onto that, in kind of a Rube Goldberg style. So that's the first reason I say we have a "so-called democracy." We have to remember that we've created this thing that we call "democracy" on the back of something that wasn't intended to be such.

And then the second reason I say "so called" is that because, when these systems were created, and given how they're constructed —you know the American Republic was created in a world before we had the railway or the telegraph. Information moved no faster than a horse. The world was not globalized in the way it is today. Technology did not move at the rapid pace it does today. And so the systems that were created for people to have a say in governance were either town hall meetings or voting. Town hall meetings were for the local level, and voting was for the national level and the state level.

Town hall meetings are a very effective way for people at the local level to debate when the community is small and when people are able to have a say. And de Tocqueville, when he visited America, observed how vibrant American society was. People were very active in local life, in their communities. They were joiners. They took part in things. That was effective when you had a small country, small communities, and an ability for people to really be involved in the civic life. And voting worked as a system when information traveled so slowly that an election was really the only feasible way for citizens as a whole to have a say in the country and in the national governance of the country.

But today, if you were — and we'll talk about this in a bit — but if you were doing that today, if you were trying to create a system today that gave people a say in affairs of governance, there would be many more ways of doing it. Some of them would be more technologically enabled than what we have now. We're still using the system that is rooted in that horse and cart technology. 

Guy:  The thing that we've been thinking about and trying to understand is what democracy is. The way I've explained it to my students over the years is with a Carl Sandberg poem. The poem features two guys talking to each other across the fence—at least I remember a cartoon version that showed that.  One says "I want your land." The other guy says "well, you can't have it." "Why not?" "Because it's mine." "Well, where'd you get it?" "From my dad." "Where did he get it?" "From his dad." "Where'd he get it?" "He fought for it." "Well, I'll fight you for it."

And that what we see democracy as — it is society's effort to get past what we call "I'll-fight-you-for-it rules." And the thing about I'll-fight-you-for-it rules" is that if you're going to fight over things like land or anything else, fights tend to escalate. You form coalitions so you can be a little stronger. That polarizes the society. You have intense battles for power, and eventually the most ruthless faction wins, and you get Lord Acton's law: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

So we see democracy as a collective security agreement in a sense, that we all agree to work together to fight these power-over actors. And in exchange, we'll give everybody the freedom to live life as they choose, but we want them to defend that freedom for others. And it's been a slow process that's evolved in a world dominated by I'll-fight-you-for-it rules. All of the great tyrannies of past and current history operate under those rules. But also, the general nature of human psychology is competition, and you have a lot of ongoing struggles within a society. And there's been, as you described, this slow halting process of trying to expand the coalition of people who are willing to join together in this collective security agreement. It's easier to do that when the technology is in the horse and buggy stage, and you have local communities that are relatively homogeneous. The challenge now is how do we do that at a level where we're so interconnected and everything is national and global?  And part of the problem is that when we cultivate democracy, or we talk about "democracy," we are still talking about, I'll-fight-you-for-it rules. So if you want to be a democratically active citizen, what you do is you put together a coalition of folks fight the other side--to force them to do something they don't want to do. And that escalates, and that's part of why we have this hyperpolarization problem. But the question is, and this you started to allude to —  how do we adapt what was a reasonably successful enterprise when it was a small-scale homogeneous democracy, to the scale and complexity of today?

And this is why I was really anxious to talk with you, because you are doing two things. One is you're trying to really imagine what a 21st century democracy would look like, and it's not going back to what we had before. You shared a video that I watched which was really eye-opening. It showed how, if we really developed AI in the right way, we could have something pretty exciting. And if we can get people to start imagining something new and better, instead of lamenting on what's past and bad, then we're in a lot better shape. So that's kind of a long ramble. But the big question is, how do you see us using a combination of technology and social technology to build a 21st century democracy that works? And maybe some of the thinking that underlay your video of what democracy in 2040 might look like. 

Gideon: As a sort of preamble to that, I want to go back to your framing there that democracy is overcoming the "I'm fighting for it," manner of doing things. I have a slightly different instinctual idea of what democracy is for. My instinctual idea of it is more about not letting the bullies win. So it's overcoming the I'll fight you for it approach, but also overcoming humans' natural tendency to just accumulate power and then use it to their advantage.

I can't remember who coined the famous phrase, "the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must." You probably know who that is. It's been getting a lot of attention lately. So for me, democracy is partly about overcoming that. 

And then you know I'm no political scientist, but as we know, there are various theories of democracy. And there's Samuel Huntington who basically said, to express it crudely, that democracy is simply when there are alternating groups in power and that they can exchange power, alternate power, peacefully. But he doesn't necessarily believe that democracy involves the people having a meaningful say. Those powerful groups have to earn the approval of the people, or they have to, at least, be seen to earn the approval of the people. But that doesn't mean that people are having meaningful say. Whereas John Dewey takes a view that democracy is really much more a process of the people being meaningfully involved in decision-making and deliberation and in policy setting. So, the question then is, if you believe in the more Deweyan form of democracy, how do you achieve that?

Even in the relatively simple earlier times of American democracy, I would argue that the Huntingtonian vision still ended up dominating, because, even in that relatively simple time, it was still far easier for governance to be done by a couple of political parties that de facto did all the decision-making and deliberation and were able to assert that they had the will of the people behind them because of elections.

But that didn't necessarily mean that people were having that much of an influence in the day-to-day. And I think we're now at the much more extreme version of that. If you look at the way that power is allocated, who gets to be in politics, who gets to influence politics, especially the amount of big money influencing politics, then we really see that today we're in a Huntingtonian state where people don't really have any say. The average person really has no meaningful say over where the political parties are going.

There were some statistics published in the New York Times recently about how, I think it was, that billionaires contributed 19% of campaign funding in the last election cycle. And a few decades ago, it was 0.3%. So the effect of big money in distorting democracy or what we call democracy, has just been much more extreme. Okay. So that was long preamble.

 And the question you were asking is, how do we use technologies to make things more democratic in the future? I'm going to try and find a way to give this answer without rambling on forever. Because, for me, reinventing democracy or creating a modern version of democracy, is a huge question. Only one part of that is about representation. But I can come to those other parts later. Let's talk first about representation citizen input.

That video that you mentioned is this rather futuristic and, frankly, quite optimistic vision of how AI might be used to complement a bunch of democratic processes that give people more of a say. Just to kind of summarize them briefly, some of those processes are things like citizen assemblies, which are already being tried in a lot of the world and also in the US, where a group of people are brought together to deliberate on a thorny political question, and their deliberation is structured in such a way that they reach consensus. So, instead of the usual political antagonism and trying to see who wins, it's about finding the largest possible consensus between those people. So you can have those happening. They are quite labor-intensive, and they involve a small group of people, and it's quite an investment of time. But there are ways in which you could use technology to enhance those, to maybe have a smaller group of people that is doing the in-person deliberations, but then giving a wider group of people the opportunity to weigh in on those deliberations online and for their opinions to be counted and contribute or maybe influence the people who are doing the in-person deliberation.

Similarly, you could use technology for a much more enhanced version of what we now have as the public comment period on a law. Right now, Congress proposes a law or somebody's proposes a law or regulation. It's posted. There's a 60-day period for public comments. It's really hard for lawmakers or policymakers to meaningfully read those comments, especially if there are a lot of them, and for those to actually have a meaningful input on the process.

But with AI, with large language models, we can now scan and analyze millions of comments from people, and figure out what are the main opinion groupings in those comments. In my video, I imagine that we create sort of AI avatars where a politician could speak to a virtual person who represents each of those opinion groupings and can talk about their reasoning and can also share individual anecdotes that people have provided. That would be a way to create interaction with public opinion that is much more detailed and granular than an opinion poll. And that gives people's individual opinions much more of a chance to be expressed, to have much more impact.

Of course, there's the whole problem of how do you deal with fake comments? How do you deal with people polluting the system with AI-generated spam? So there are a lot of technical questions there. But that's an example of how you could better involve people's voices.

And there are also ways of using AI to make people better-informed citizens. Again, there's a problem of how do you ensure that people are actually seeking out information or being delivered information that makes them better informed, as opposed to being pushed further into their echo chambers. None of these is a solved problem.

But the general gist here is that there are ways to both inform people better and solicit their opinions and their viewpoints on things in a more ongoing way in between elections that allows them to participate but doesn't require them to spend hours in a town hall meeting arguing with people. And I think that's the critical thing. As I said earlier, we still primarily have two extremes. You can either vote or you can spend hours in a town hall meeting. There aren't many meaningful ways to participate democratically in between those two. 

And I think that technology gives us the opportunity to create some of those ways, where you can have a contribution, but it doesn't have to take up all your time.

Heidi: I was struck at the beginning of this video — I don't know where you gave it. I don't remember. But it seemed like it was at a university with students in the audience.

Gideon: It was at a meeting of funders — people from different philanthropies. 

Heidi: Oh, that's even more interesting! Okay. What makes that very interesting is you asked right at the beginning, I think, what is democracy for? 

Gideon: Yeah. What's the purpose of democracy? 

Heidi: And I was really struck that it seemed like the audience was struggling with that question. 

Gideon: Yeah 

Heidi: They eventually came up with some answers, weak answers, I felt. They were struggling with that. And I thought it was interesting that students were struggling. Now I'm hearing that it was funders. I'm thinking, "Oh, my heavens." If funders are struggling with this question, that's really scary. So that's one thing that I think is really sobering.

Connected to that is something that we've been hearing over and over again and was talked about in another webinar that you organized at the Ash Center that talked about how to make democracy interesting. And one of the main points of the speakers, which we've heard many other times, is the word "democracy" isn't interesting. People don't relate to it. They're not interested in it. They're not convinced as Guy and I am. that it's the only alternative to what we call I'll-fight- you-for-it rules, and that is usually called autocracy or authoritarianism. None of that plays very well. And so the point of that webinar and a lot of other discussions is how can we get people more interested in saving democracy because we see it's important. And I have this conversation with Guy a lot. And his line is, "Democracy is too important a word for us to abandon." So I'm curious about what you think about the fact that people, important people, did not understand what the purpose of democracy is? I think you and we agree that this system that we have, and more importantly, that we could create, is certainly better than the alternatives out there. The word authoritarianism apparently does not play very well at all either. Nobody cares about beating authoritarianism any more than they care about saving democracy. But we think it's very important to do, nonetheless. How do we get people on board with that? Short of talking about other things. A lot of the answers I felt, in that webinar were kind of, "Well, talk about other things." And that's fine, but we also need to do something about democracy.

Gideon: Yeah.  I think those two things that you pointed to, that talk that I had with these funders, and then that webinar about democracy storytelling, are related. The reason that those funders could not answer the question, "What is democracy for?" is not because they didn't think it was important. It was actually, I think, the reverse. They were so convinced it was important that they had forgotten why. And they thought it was unnecessary to try to convince other people that it was important, because they took it for granted that everybody thought it was. 

And the same is true of the Democratic Party. So much of its messaging around Trump was, "He's a threat to democracy." And there was a kind of finger wagging about it, I think, a kind of, "You'll miss democracy when it's gone." But nobody tried to explain why. 

Heidi: Ha, ha.That's us, too.

Gideon:  Or they tried to say, "Yeah. You know authoritarianism is bad." But the reason that that didn't work, I think, is that people understood that authoritarianism is bad, but nobody was convinced that what we have, that we call "democracy," is significantly better. And so this goes back to what I was saying earlier. First of all, it's a "so-called democracy." People don't feel like it really is representative of them. A lot of people have been left behind, and that's what Trump tapped into.

People got left behind, for instance, in the sense that manufacturing was offshore, and rural communities were abandoned, and social safety nets were weakened. And all of these factors meant that a large part of America's population was left behind. You could say that that wasn't because of democracy. It was because of bad policies. It was because of the neoliberal consensus. And all of that is true.

But what it meant was that people thought, "Well, okay, the supposedly democratic process is supposed to lead to better outcomes, because it allows the most competitive or most valuable ideas to surface, but it hasn't worked for us. It hasn't achieved the social benefits that it should have. It hasn't achieved widespread prosperity." And then people obviously got worked up about other issues like immigration that Trump tapped into very well. And so democracy, as a concept, had no value. And the people who were promoting democracy, like those funders or like the Democratic Party, just forgot and lost sight of that. They didn't understand that. They took it for granted that people thought democracy was a good thing. 

So then that comes to the question, "how do you convince people democracy is a good thing?" I don't think it helps to say  "You'll be sorry when democracy is gone." And it's not fixed by giving people a civics class and trying to explain to them why it matters. So what is it? That's a little harder to answer. 

I think one of the things that we have seen over the last years and decades is that the left and right communicate in very different terms. The right communicates through grievances. It tells a kind grand narrative, appealing to people at a more emotional level. And the left has been very technocratic and factual. "Here are the facts. Here's what you should understand. Here's why it all makes sense."

And this gap, this disconnect, has opened up for people between the facts that they're being told and the reasons they're being given for why democracy is important versus what they see in terms of its impact on their daily lives. That explanatory argument, that fact-based argument that the left has been making, has lost its force for people.

So I think what the pro-democracy forces — I'm going to deliberately not say "the left" because there's obviously a fair swath of people across center and center-right who also believe that democracy is generally a good idea, even if they disagree on some of the outputs that are produced. So, I'm going to say "the small d democrats." The small d democrats have not yet figured out a way to talk about democracy in a way that people care about.

They need to form a grand narrative, a meta-narrative, about democracy not as a kind of a bulwark against authoritarianism, but as something positive that actually brings you benefits. And they need to make the case for how it can do that. And I think that narrative has to tie in somewhat to what kinds of values we want to have as a society, what prosperity means, what freedom means. 

You probably know George Lakoff, the scholar of linguistics at Berkeley.  He wrote this book about 20 years ago called Whose Freedom, in which he argues that the right and the left have now completely different meanings of the word "freedom." The right has managed to develop this notion of freedom, which is all about freedom from things, freedom from intervention, freedom from oversight, basically freedom to do whatever you want. Whereas the left has a whole bunch of what you might call "positive freedoms," — freedom from want — the Rooseveltian things —freedom from fear, and the freedom to have gainful employment and so on and so forth. And the right has managed to appropriate this word "freedom" And it has formed its own grand narrative around freedom, and the left has not managed to do that. So democrats, small d-democrats, have yet to figure out this grand narrative about what the values around democracy are that matter to people. And then they have to tell the smaller stories, and this is what my Harvard webinar workshop was about. They have to figure out how to tell the smaller stories that give people a sense of belief in democracy, not by talking explicitly about "this is democracy and it's good," but by showing examples of democratic practice, showing examples of local communities coming together to solve difficult problems, showing examples of people fighting against an unfair system, overturning power and giving the people more of a say and that coming out better for people. So stories that turn this abstract idea into felt, lived personal, concrete experiences. 

Guy: I'd like to raise another part of this larger puzzle, which is something we call the "bad-faith actor problem". And that is going back to I'll-fight-you-for-it rules. There are certainly a lot of folks who are very competitive and seeking as nice a position in the society as they can get. One of the features of humans, apart from other animal species, is that we really are susceptible to boundless greed. You can have staggering numbers of billions of dollars, and you want more. And there are always going to be these people.

I think a big part of why people have lost faith in democracy relates to the fact that there are these bad-faith actors who aren't making a good-faith effort to make democracy work, but rather, they are hijacking the language and institutions of democracy as part of an I'll-fight-you-for-it struggle for as much power and money as possible. And that somehow we've got to do a lot better job of separating true efforts, good-faith efforts to make democracy work and work through all of our deep differences from bad-faith efforts, which are trying to sugarcoat, old-fashioned,  I'll-fight-you-for-it rules.

In the age of high-tech communication systems and the manipulation of information feeds and all of this, the ability to use social media to target cast, essentially, specific propaganda to specific people, based on their personal beliefs that come out of these giant databases of what everybody's like is a huge asset to bad-faith actors. We've somehow got to figure out how to separate the two.

It's a deep technological problem that is probably only solvable with technology, but technology with robust oversight of it, somehow. At any rate, I'm sure you have the solution to this, and I'm anxious to hear it.

Gideon:  No. I mean, the problem of bad-faith actors is that in a system that is given to manipulation, bad-faith actors will manipulate it. And the more vulnerable it is, the more they will do so. And it is very vulnerable right now, in part because of the power of money in American politics — the Citizens United decision obviously played a huge role in that. And it's also, as you pointed out, because of social media and because of the ease of spreading misinformation, that has given a new lever to bad-faith actors. So, what is the solution exactly? I don't know.

It has to come from somewhere, it has to come from below. It has to come from people who are just fed up with the system pushing against it. But I also think it's going to be a long institutional struggle. My personal view is that the forces of pro-democracy need to mount a decades-long campaign to overturn Citizens United in the way that conservatives mounted a decades-long campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade. I think it's that kind of long-term thinking that is essential if we're going to restore or create any kind of semblance of democracy here. And one of the critiques of progressives is that they have engaged in fairly short-term thinking ever since the Civil Rights Movement. And they haven't built these grand narratives, and they haven't built these long-term goals in the way that conservatives did.

But other than that, I don't think that there's a good single answer to how you overcome bad-faith actors. And I also don't think that technology in itself is the solution. Technology will always be appropriated by whoever wants to try to use it for whatever ends. And the powerful often manage to appropriate it for their ends at the cost of the less powerful.

In the work that I've done, I keep on encountering people who say, "If we built this technological system, if we built this form of civic participation via technology, if we used the blockchain, whatever it is, we would get to a more democratic system. And I think that is basically always false. I think there's a line from an article that the scholar Zeynep Tufekci wrote for me at MIT Technology Review a bunch of years ago. She was talking about why social media started out as this democratic hope during the Arab Spring and then ended up being the thing that helped Trump get into power. And she has this line, which to me is unforgettable. She says, "Power always learns. Powerful tools always fall into its hands." And I think that's just a very good summary of the fact that whatever technology you create, those with power will use it to their own ends. And the technology itself is incapable of restricting that. It can empower the forces that are against autocracy. It can give them new tools. So it can be helpful in that way. But you're still going to have a bit of an arms race between the two sides. And one of the things that I've long felt that we need is a loophole response system. Anything that you put together to try to curtail the power of the powerful, they're going to look for, and pay a lot of money for, people to find clever ways around that. You can't say "Hey, I did it. It's done. We did this whatever reform, repealing Citizens United or whatever." That's only a step, and it will only last for a little while, and you've got to pay attention to what the next attack is going to look like, and you've got to be able to respond to that just as fast. 

Guy: One of the most optimistic thoughts I've had lately is that AI promises to dramatically reduce the cost of expertise and information. Right now, expertise and information tend to concentrate around people with a lot of money. By reducing the cost, it, in theory, and this is only in theory, gives people with less money the ability to anticipate and identify these loophole workarounds that the powerful are using, and respond to them much more quickly than they could before. AI can listen to a larger number of potential allies and suggest how to put together coalitions of people who agree that a particular action is a bad idea and and help define the best ways of countering these loopholes. But it might, since, as you quite rightly described, it's an arms race, it might bolster the little guy in ways that could restore a lot of faith in this. I don't know, I might be totally hopelessly optimistic. It's kind of a combination of, not a technological tool that you set up and you forget and everything's fine, but a tool that has to be actively and deliberately and creatively used by lots and lots of people over time.

Gideon: I think the tools are just tools. And again, I think they can be used by whichever side or whichever forces can use them, and everybody will use them. I think this is why I feel like technology has an important role to play, but ultimately, by placing faith in technology, we go astray. Ultimately, this is about people. This is about having a story about why democracy matters, and it's about having leaders who can articulate that story, who can tap into the frustrations that people have with the existing system, sketch out to them what a better thing could look like, and carry them along. And Trump did that incredibly effectively for his particular brand of politics.

The counter-Trump wing or movement has not produced that leader yet, and it has not produced the story yet that will meet that moment. But I think that leader has to emerge. I think people like Zaran Mamdani are an example of that. I think he was able to tap into something really basic, in the same way that Trump was able to tap into American frustration. Mamdani tapped into anger about affordability. And then, of course, he was very charismatic. He ran this campaign that was run from the grassroots in a way similar to what Barack Obama did. And so he's a very compelling figure in that way. How well he will govern still remains to be seen. But I think he was showing the way to a new kind of politics for the left, which has not previously existed. It's that form of being able to energize people, motivate them around a clear message, and then bring them along. I think that is the thing that you need. It's the sine qua non. Whatever technologies you're using to try to counter authoritarianism or to give people deliberative powers or involve public opinion or whatever technologies you're using, political leadership is the thing that makes it possible. Otherwise, the technologies don't get you anything.

I think that one of the reasons that we've not had that on the pro-democracy side is that, again, small d democrats and the large D Democrats, but the small d democrats in particular, thought that we had achieved democracy, right? We went through all of this long process, the Civil War, getting the franchise for black people, then the franchise for women, the Voting Rights Act, all of these things. And finally, we got democracy. And now that we had it, we could just keep it running. We didn't have to keep on fighting for it. The fact is, we did need to keep on fighting for it. We needed to keep on making the case for why is important. We needed to keep on testing the ways in which it was falling short and re-engineering it. This is in response to what you were saying, that you have to be constantly vigilant. You have to look for the loopholes. You have to look for the ways in which they're being exploited. You have to update the institutions to meet the changing world. We didn't do that. We just sort of said, "All right. We built the machine and now it runs." 

I think one of the most important paradigm shifts that has to happen for people who are pro-democracy is to stop thinking of democracy as a set of institutions that you build and then run, but instead, as a continuously evolving process where those institutions are constantly rethought, and participation is constantly rethought.  The whole approach must be constantly being reinvented in order to stay true to the original principles and the original goals that it had. 

Heidi: If it's okay with the two of you, I'd like to take us off for a little bit in a different direction. One of the things that I've been concerned about for a long time is the decreased trust in experts and the decreased trust in the notion of facts and the credibility of news and journalism. And Trump has contributed to this a lot, by saying, for instance, that the media is a threat to democracy. But the left has bought into that too. The postmodern scholarship was just coming into vogue when we were in grad school, which pretty much said that anybody's truth is as good as anybody else's truth, and there's no way to know what to believe. I see a lot of journalism falling into that notion too. Maybe I'm being unfair there. But how do you do journalism when A) people don't trust the media, and B) people don't think there are such things as facts. 

Gideon: So I think the question is, "how do you create demand for journalism that is based in facts?" Do journalism. And this idea that you probably know Ethan Zuckerman, UMass Amherst, who used to be at MIT, Professor of Communications. And he's one of the co-founders of Global Voices Online, which is this huge international blogging network, one of the most successful online communities ever created in terms of its longevity and its ability to hold cohesion. So he has done a lot of work in trying to imagine new forms of social media. He and I were at a conference a few years ago, and I was talking about the question you're raising. I asked, "What does it look like to create forms of media that are trusted?" And he said, "The problem is not what kind of media you create. The problem is how you create the demand for that." 

Some of the answer to that, I think, is at the local community level. We all know how local journalism in the US has been decimated over the last few decades. The business model of local newspapers no longer works. People are getting their information from the national news and from websites and so on.  And that, itself, is part of a kind of fraying of the civic fabric. So, the loss of local news is also associated with the splaying of the civic fabric and of points of commonality between people in local communities.
 

So I think that there is a case to be made that when you bring local communities together around a shared problem, and that could be a zoning question, or it could be problems of water quality or homelessness or some other issue that affects the local community. If you can create the forum where people from across the community from different political backgrounds come together, recognize the problem that they have to solve together, are given tools for solving it together, then they also are going to need sources of information that everyone in that group can agree to trust. And local media can play that role. 

And so the question is, how do you pull all this together? How do you create those local forms of shared deliberation, that sense of shared problems, and then shared information sources? And there are some projects around the country that are trying to do that. I'm going to visit one later this month called Civic Lakes in Lexington, Kentucky, where they have done a bunch of work where they are simultaneously holding community events. They're holding a local civic assembly. They provide local journalism and reporting on city council. They provide explainers. They fund block parties. They fund art events. They kind of do all of these different kinds of stitching together the local community in different ways and adding a layer of local journalism. So that there is a trusted information source that everyone can share in. That's what I mean by creating demand. You have to make people want a source of information they can all trust in order for you to be able to then produce that source and then do it in such a way that they can trust it.

Heidi: So how do you do that at the broader national level? 

Gideon: I don't have a good answer right now. I think you know there are always communities, and that might be the banking community, for instance, or business or certain policy people who need information that they can trust to be reasonably balanced and fact-based.

But then there's an awful lot of the country that does not have those needs in the same way and that are easy to manipulate into trusting one side or another. And I don't have a good answer to that. I will say one thing about the mainstream media, the fact-based media. I think it is true that a couple of generations ago, American newspapers were more representative of their readers. And the city metros, in particular, had a broad-based appeal to a broad-based population, and their journalists were taken from that population and were more likely to be working class. Today, journalism has become very professionalized. One of the things that has happened since then is the sorting of America. The cities have become more liberal and the rural communities have become more conservative, and the newspapers that serve those cities have themselves started to reflect the city population and its concerns more. They've become more liberal. And so the accusation that the mainstream media has a liberal bias is true. And the people who work in mainstream media tend to be more educated, and so they tend to have more liberal values. And so I think it's unsurprising that conservatives started to distrust those institutions and to create their own alternative media ecosystem, which is now extremely powerful.

So that problem of trust is based, in some sense, in the media catering to the audiences it was serving and those audiences having a certain political leaning. 

Heidi: Which they have to do, with the funding model that we have.

Gideon: Right. The business model requires them to serve the audiences that they have. And so in part, you could say it's not their fault, because it is a function, a product of the way that urban and rural communities have shifted politically. But the media also, I think, were unaware of this. The mainstream media were very bought into this idea that they do objective journalism and that they just report the facts. And it's part of the mythos of how American journalism works. And it lost sight of the extent to which what they chose to cover is shaped by who they're reporting to, who they're reporting for. So, I really struggle with this idea of journalistic objectivity. I don't think objectivity exists. You can do journalism in a very fair and fact-based way. You can go and seek the information and track down the sources and balance the information and try and give the fairest account that you can. But what you choose to cover, what you consider important, what you privilege, what you ignore, that is very much a function of your biases or the preferences of the population that you're serving. And so it can be very easy for that coverage to skew, not in terms of its factuality, but in terms of what it considers important. And I think that is what produces the sensation that the media has a liberal bias.

Guy: Part of the difficulty here is the distinction between what we sometimes call "sharp feedback" stories and "fuzzy feedback" stories. The reason why you care about truth is that reality bites, and if you try to pretend that the world is not as it is, there are situations in which that will really hurt you. It will produce sharp feedback. The world of technology, for instance, is a sharp feedback system. If you build a computer and it doesn't work, you'll find out real quick, and you won't be able to sell it, and the market will be ruthless.

Situations in which people do things, and it doesn't work out, and they find out quickly and clearly, are very different from what we call fuzzy feedback stories, where you're trying to alter the course of society at a time when there are lots and lots of different forces that all play out over long periods of time that are all competing, and it any change gets lost in this noisy mess. So, it's not easy to tell whether what you did is going to have a bad effect or not, and it might take a long time to find out. So for example, you can incur staggering deficits for decades on end, but it might still come back to bite you. But the thing about fuzzy feedback stories is that it's pretty easy to come up with a rationalization that tells everybody what they want to hear. And it's hard to say, "No, that's not true," and demonstrate clearly that that's the fact. Whatever facts there are, are  awfully hard to determine. So the real challenge is how do you get through that? And that has to do with dealing with complexity, which is something humans aren't very good at. 

Gideon: Yeah. So what's an example then, do you think, of a shop or a fuzzy feedback story?

Guy: Well, I think a good fuzzy feedback story is the budget deficit. Both the left and the right find that it's politically very attractive to argue that we can give you more and more money in all sorts of ways. It's a great way to resolve disputes — just pass the costs on to future generations. They don't have a seat at the table. So part of what we need are institutions that represent future generations and give them clout. Now, a sharp feedback story is one where you say that, "Well, we can pull off this war with Iran, and there won't be an interruption and a collapse of the world oil market, and people won't notice." And we may well find out very quickly what happened there.

Gideon: Yeah. Well, I think even with sharp feedback stories, as we've seen, you can still end up with two camps that see the story from very different points of view, right? And the administration, whichever administration is in power, can spin things its way and get its people on its side, whilst the people of the opposing party are fed a very different narrative. And yes, that is part of the problem that we face today with social media.

So the sharp feedback story that breaks through and makes everybody see that something is wrong is actually quite rare. A good example of that is the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Suddenly, because he was a white guy not bearing a gun, even the people who were supporting the ICE crackdown on immigration could see that something was not quite right here, right? But it takes something as extreme as that to break through. 

Heidi: So, what can journalists do to try to make their readers better informed about the nature of democracy and why it is worth defending? And is that a role of journalism? 

Gideon: I think it is. And I think one of the difficulties has been that the US mainstream press, as I said, has been so brought into this idea that it is just doing objective reporting on the facts that it has — this is maybe changing now — but I think for a while, a lot of it held back from taking an explicit stance on democracy. Journalists said, "Well, yes, we're sure democracy is important. We're going to report on the ways in which it has been undermined or threats to it and so forth." But it was still done in a kind of detached way. We're just reporting what's going on. I don't think the press can remain detached when democracy itself is under threat, because the very idea of a free press doesn't exist when you don't have democracy, right?

One trend that we're seeing in the last few years is the rise of online influencers who find a community, find an issue, and connect with them. And the whole game there is not objectivity and the voice from above and the dispassionate approach. It's very much about authenticity, about personal connection, about having a point of view.

But the worlds of influencers and journalism have remained largely separate. There's a handful of journalists who are also very influential on social media and can get their views across that way. But for the most part, these are seen as different things. And traditional journalism distrusts influencers and their approaches and their methodology and sees them as unserious and so on.

I think if journalists want to make the case for democracy, I think they actually need to be able to combine those techniques. They need to take unapologetic stances. They need to take a personal position. They need to connect with their audiences. They need to have a narrative. Going back to what I said about a grand narrative, they need to have that grand narrative of why democracy matters, why you suffer if it doesn't exist. And then they have to do reporting that shows that in practice. And that reporting might be about corruption or about people whose lives have been destroyed by a certain government policy or the ways that power is abused.

But they have to connect that to emotion and to that broader story, instead of just being like a series of facts that they throw out there. And I do think that there are the beginnings of that starting to happen. There are a handful of people who are journalists, independent of mainstream media, that also employ the methods of influencers, employ the social media native. I've seen one or two examples of people who are now trying to cultivate that style. In other words, train people who are naturally social media natives and who have that influencer mindset, to also train them in the techniques of journalism, of reporting and fact-checking and so forth. But I think that is a kind of media that has to emerge. People who are trained journalists, who know how to do it properly, and are also unapologetic about their political leaning, being pro-democracy. 

Heidi: Can you give me a couple of names that I and our listeners could look up to get some examples of what you're talking about? 

Gideon: The most prominent example that comes to mind for me is the YouTube channel, Channel 5 News, run by Andrew Callahan, who, if I'm not mistaken, actually did study journalism, but then he decided not to pursue the mainstream media route. And he became famous by doing interviews with very unexpected people. One of the early ones he did, that was very controversial, was of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist. I actually did not think that was a particularly good interview, because I thought it gave Alex Jones a little too much space. But Callahan has this style of being able to talk to people who have the most unusual, extreme views, or lifestyles, or whatever, and just talk to them and listen to them in a very non-judgmental manner. And in doing so, he's able to bring people out in a way that most other journalists cannot. And he's since translated that ability into doing some really quite hard-hitting reporting. An example that comes to mind is he went to Philadelphia and he talked to people living on the streets about the power of the drug gangs. And at one point, he ends up in the house of some drug kingpins who are masked and showing off their guns and the drugs and talking about how they supply the drugs everywhere in Philadelphia. No mainstream journalist would have been able to get that kind of interview. And there is something about his style that allows him to make those connections and get people to talk to him. But he uses the techniques of social media to reach the audiences and tell stories in ways that compel them. And he actually does not, contrary to what I was saying earlier, he does not take a particularly ideological agenda. But he is telling stories about things like the power of the drug gangs and the neglect that the authorities have had in these particular parts of Philadelphia. And he tells those stories in ways that connect with people. 

There are a couple of other guys I know, Joe Posner and James Watson, both journalists from very established backgrounds. James was at CBS and the New York Times. Joe Posner was at Vox Media. Joe worked on the video side of Vox Media and he trained a lot of young video journalists, some of whom went on to become quite prominent online influencers. He has this idea that it is possible to locate young people who want to be in journalism, who don't see an opportunity in the mainstream media business, who are native to social media and understand its techniques, and giving them the training and the wherewithal to be social media influencers who are also thorough, rigorous, trained journalists.

Cultivating that kind of ecosystem, I think, seems to me like a hopeful proposition. Or at it least can start to create some of what is needed to counter that strong influence of the alternative right-wing media ecosystem and the distrust of mainstream media on all sides.

Guy: One of the things that we've been trying to figure out how to do, and we'd be interested in your thoughts on this, obviously, is how do you decouple the defense of democracy and democratic institutions and the fair treatment for everyone from partisan politics, in a world in which people like to dress up their partisan ambitions as the defense of democracy? And there's this concept of a political order, which is a set of political beliefs that both sides agree on. And what we really need to cultivate, I think, is a set of minimal standards about what democracy really is, that folks on both sides will defend. And see it as a system, a dispute handling system, that fairly and wisely and equitably works through all of the partisan disputes that we have. And I don't think people see it that way very much. We did a webinar with some staff members from the US Congress, and they mostly thought that what democracy was the pursuit of their partisan agenda. The notion that there's something underlying, an underlying commonality that holds us all together, is largely missing and something we need to cultivate. Is this something that you've thought of or seen people actually trying to do better yet — that would be good at modeling? 

Gideon: I don't know that there are any political leaders who are trying to do it right now. As you say, I think the political leaders are mostly about a partisan agenda. I do think there is a vacuum there. There is a space for someone to emerge who can weave a compelling political narrative that draws in a sufficiently wide number of people from the left over to the moderate right that says, essentially, this breakdown in democratic institutions is making your life worse and can articulate the ways in which it makes your life worse, wherever you are on this fairly wide political spectrum. That leader hasn't emerged yet. And that broad story has not been told or has not been told compellingly. 

And it may require things to get really bad, before that can happen.  So I don't know. I think things are pretty bad already, but it may require them to get a lot worse before a sufficient number of people are receptive to that kind of message and a leader emerges who can compellingly make that kind of message.

One of the tragedies, I think, of the Democratic Party right now is that it has effectively split into two wings, one of which is the kind of moderate technocratic wing which tries to appeal to center left, center, center right, all about making government work better and trying to overcome the dysfunction of government and make it serve people better, versus the more progressive wing, which is about taking down the billionaires and restoring the power of the people.

I don't think these two are actually opposed, but they have become opposed in people's minds. And these two wings see themselves as incompatible. I don't think they are. I think an effective leader could emerge who is able to find a common cause and a common narrative between these very disparate wings. 

Trump was a great example of that for the right. He was able to unite the traditional conservatives and the evangelists and MAGA and all of these different groups that actually have very little in common with each other ideologically. But he was able to give them a common voice and a common story. Somebody like that needs to emerge for the center to the left, and that person has not come yet. 

Heidi: Well, I'm very aware of the fact that we've run over what we promised you. So I think we probably ought to bring this to a close, but I always ask at the end, is there any question that you wish that we'd ask that we didn't ask?

Gideon: Ooh, I can't think of one.

Heidi: All right. Well, we really appreciate this conversation. We've learned a lot from it, and we appreciate the work that you're doing. I'm just beginning to delve into it. But we really thank you very much, and we will put links to your stuff on the transcript on the website. And hope we can stay in touch. I think you're really doing interesting things.

Gideon: Thank you.