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- [00:02]
A
Guess what day it is. It's French Friday. It's French fry day. So grab your fries and say hooray. David French is here to play on French fry day. It's French Fry Day.
- [00:18]
B
Mr. French, welcome back. Good to see you.
- [00:21]
A
Great to see you. Sky, how are you doing?
- [00:23]
B
I'm okay. So since the last time we spoke, you had a little time out in Hollywood. I saw that you were on the what's his name, Bill Maher show.
- [00:34]
A
Bill Maher, Yeah.
- [00:35]
B
Give us a little insight. What was that like?
- [00:38]
A
You know, it is the most hospitable show on television in the sense that, you know, I've done all of these different, like, talking head type appearances, and people are very nice and, you know, they're very warm and welcoming, and they're very glad you're doing it and all of this. But these guys just, they. They put you up in a nice place. They prep you for the show very comprehensively. They are very kind to you when you're there. And then the actual show itself is a lot more high pressure than sort of any other show you do because there's the live studio audience. Bill does things very differently from a. Bill does things very differently from other hosts. So, like, if you were on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, he would. And you and I were a panelist, he would say, sky, what do you think? Or, you know, he would address you, and then he'd turn to me and say, David. And then, you know, when you're supposed to speak, when you're not supposed to speak, interruption is not encouraged. You know, however, with Bill show, if you don't speak up, that's it for you. Now, he will kind of, you know, he'll come, he'll. He'll maybe start the ball rolling, but you got to get in. You got to kind of get in yourself, which is, if you're not used to it, doing it in a way that makes you not a jerk, but flows with the. Flows with the conversation in front of the live studio audience is a little trickier than you might think. It's fun. I enjoy it. But I will tell you, this guy, just as a transparent bit of embarrassment between you and me and all of our listeners, I was on once before in 2017, and I think it was pro. I'm probably more embarrassed by that appearance than maybe any other media appearance. And it's not because it's a dumb reason. This is a dumb, vain reason. So here. Here it is. I was sitting next to Van Jones, who is. If you've Ever been around Van Jones? He's a very nice guy and he is absolutely impeccably like he, he's impeccably dressed, he's incredibly poised. You know, he just comes across as a person who's together, got it all together. And I walked out there and this is going to sound dumb, but I had like a problem with my jacket or something, so it was kind of behind me. It didn't look right. And then I was new to the show and so I just wasn't quite understanding how the flow worked and everything. And so both visually and sort of in every way, I gave off the impression of like super harried adjunct English professor.
- [03:17]
B
You, you were just a rookie. That's all. You were a rookie.
- [03:19]
A
It was bad. It was bad. But I, this time was, it was a lot of fun from start to finish. I enjoyed the, I enjoyed the whole process. So. Yeah, but it is, it is a unique, it is a unique show, a unique atmosphere, unique environment.
- [03:36]
B
I watched it and I was entertained by it for sure. I don't catch it every week. I catch clips often online when there's something interesting or someone interesting on the show. But Bill Maher, he's become quite controversial because he's been all over the map. Some people, I mean, he calls himself a progressive and on certain issues he absolutely is. But in recent years he's been more aiming his fire at progressives in a lot of ways. And then he was certainly critical of Donald Trump, but then he went and had dinner with Trump at the White House, which got a lot of. He's been all over the map on a lot of different things. And so he's hard to pin. Now, I thought when you said it's a hard show to be on because you weren't. You don't know what Bill's gonna throw at you, but it sounds like it's more because of just the way he structures the conversation. It's harder to know when you should jump in.
- [04:23]
A
I think I pretty much know sort of where Bill is on various issues. My impression from a distance for him is that he doesn't like bullies. Like a lot of libertarian minded people. I'm a libertarian minded person myself. I really don't like bullies. He doesn't like bullies. And so if you've been in a very, very, very blue part of the country, a lot of the bullies you've been exposed to have been on that far left, that very, on that cancel culture environment, the intolerance we saw in the far left and if you're like me, where you were living until very recently in an 85% MAGA neighborhood, the bullies of the far left are. They're on tv, they're on Twitter. They're not in your life, the bullies in your life. That's maga. That's the people who are sort of the mirror image of the hyper intolerant people on the far left who are. Will cancel you and try to intimidate you and threaten you and, and you can kind of see it like issue by issue. It's almost like where he sees the principal bully is where he's aiming his fire.
- [05:27]
B
Well, in that regard, he sounds a lot like the founders who were deeply suspicious of illiberal majorities.
- [05:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are, There are worse ways to go through life than opposing bullies. Indeed, where you find them. Yeah.
- [05:40]
B
All right, well, speaking of bullies, I wanted to begin by talking to you about some. All the controversy that's erupted out of the Supreme Court and its ruling on Calais. But before we get into that, we need to talk about the background of this, which is gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering, where majority white populations, especially in southern states, try to gerrymander or eliminate black representation in the south through Germany.
- [06:04]
A
Okay.
- [06:05]
B
We need to go back to the very basics though. For people who are like, what is gerrymandering? The word thrown around a lot. I forget the exact origins, but I remember, I think it was a New York congressman or political boss, last name Jerry, and they redrew districts that look like a salamander. So someone came up in the newspapers with this term, gerrymander, to describe the look of these districts, these congressional districts. But the basic idea is you can draw a district to include certain voters and exclude certain other voters in order to maximize representation for your party. It's always been a part of the American political environment. But Section 2 of the Voting Rights act from 1965 explicitly prohibits race based gerrymandering. Explain the origins of that law and take us up to the point where we are dealing with this Calais ruling from the Supreme Court.
- [07:01]
A
So this is going to be broad brush because it's very complicated. But, but look at it this way, a couple of what you have are several phases of vote suppression of black voters in the south or vote dilution of. Of black voters in the South. So, you know, phase one, you're in slavery. No, no voting rights and pay on paper in theory, etc. Phase two, post reconstruction, you have a large black population that had enjoyed voting Rights during the Reconstruction era had voted in lots of black representatives, senators, state and federal level. You know, you had, you had broad based black representation. Then with the end of Reconstruction, all of that stops. And they didn't stop it by necessarily explicitly saying black people don't have the right to vote. They did it by doing things like poll taxes, literacy tests, in other words, putting impediments in front of that right to vote that were definitely not evenly applied, even handedly distributed, anything like that. And so what ended up happening is post Reconstruction, until really the Voting Rights act, black representation in the south vanished to almost nothing. And so when Voting Rights act comes in, at first it had to be aimed at just restoring the ability to get into the polls. So literary test, literacy test, poll taxes, what they did is they just prevented you from voting at all. And so sort of job one of Voting Rights act was to make sure people could cast a ballot. Okay, but racists are endlessly inventive and creative. And so they basically say, okay, well if we can't stop you from casting a ballot, how can we stop your ballot from mattering to the outcome? What can we do with that? And then that's where you get to vote dilution. So let's suppose you have a state that is 60, 40, white, black. Now this will not work. Or 65, 35, 70, 30, whatever, whatever equation you want to do. Now this will not work unless voting is very racially polarized. In other words, unless basically almost all white people vote one party, almost all black people vote another party. But if that's the case where white people vote one way, black people vote the other way, you can do a racial gerrymander that make sure that there is a black minority in every district, never a black majority. And if there's never a black majority and there's super heavy, heavily racially polarized voting, you will not have any black representatives and you won't even have any representatives of any color that are representing the black citizens in the state. So for example, in Memphis, which was an overwhelmingly black district, voted for a white member of Congress. But that's what the black voters in this, in that district wanted. So the whole purpose of vote dilution is to not give black voters what they want. Right? Okay, so that's the basic. So the way the law had to evolve was, okay, we can make sure that people vote, but then what happens with gerrymandering? If it's an explicit racial gerrymander for the purpose of vote dilution of black voters, then does the voting rights act, cover that, does it encompass that? And what kind of evidence is necessary to show that all of that is part of this litigation? So what we're dealing with is not, no black people. You can't go to the polls. What we're dealing with is, okay, well, you can go to the polls, but we're going to fix the whole scheme so that you do not live in a place in your state. You cannot elect a person of your choice. Yeah.
- [10:51]
B
Within my understanding and reading of just gerrymandering in general, the two tactics are known as cracking and packing. Yeah, cracking is you take a community, it could be a racial community or any kind of community that votes in a similar way, and you break them apart. So you put a little bit of each of them into different districts so you dilute their vote, like you're saying. And they can't ever get a representative that represents their community. That's cracking, packing. The inverse of it is let's take everybody from the same group and put them all into one district. So, yeah, they will get one representative.
- [11:24]
A
Right. But it's better.
- [11:26]
B
It's better than them having four or five or six representatives. So cracking and packing has historically been the way that you gerrymander to get the outcome you want. Now, my understanding is in this present case, that the Supreme Court just decided, essentially what they said is it's okay to gerrymander for partisan reasons.
- [11:45]
A
Yeah.
- [11:46]
B
Right. But it's not okay to gerrymander for racial reasons.
- [11:49]
A
Right, Correct.
- [11:50]
B
But when, as you put it, when the black vote is, what is it, 85, 90% democrat in most of the country, including the south, it's hard to tell the difference between what is a partisan gerrymander and what's a racial gerrymander. And even if you can make a clear case that the gerrymander is purely for partisan reasons, is that really something
- [12:11]
A
we should be okay with? Yeah. So that I'm glad you, you brought us to phase two. That makes this all more complicated. So just to be overly simplified, again, basically there are two broadly two broad types of gerrymander that are common in America right now. The partisan gerrymander, which is, I'm just trying to increase my side's representation and decrease the other side's representation on the basis of party, not on the basis of race. I want more Republicans and fewer Democrats if I'm in a Republican state. Or I want more Democrats and fewer Republicans if I'm in a. If I'm in a Democratic state. And the Supreme Court, gosh, 2018, 2019, can't remember exactly when basically said, none of our business. We are not going to interfere with partisan gerrymanders. So. And the reason for that is the Constitution doesn't really give you great grounding for how to decide all that. That's a classic political question. And if the Supreme Court is interpreting the Constitution, the Constitution is silent on that matter. It's just very difficult to pull out constitutional principles to govern partisan gerrymandering. Racial gerrymandering is different. You've got the 14th amendment, you've got the 15th amendment. There's very clear constitutional guidance that you cannot be discriminating on the basis of race. And so basically what the Supreme Court has done is to just sort of take a bunch of complicated cases and distill it all down. If, if the racism of the gerrymander is explicit, in other words, we have clear on the record evidence of racism, we are going to, we will intervene, we will stop that. If, however, the partisan gerrymander and the racial gerrymander are indistinguishable from each other, just the same way that you said, Scott, like, if you're going to gerrymander on a partisan basis in Louisiana, it's going to be separating white and black voters, it's going to be cracking and packing black districts, etc. If you're going to do a racist gerrymandering, you would do the same thing. Right. Because the overlap is so precise. And so basically, the way I've described the outcome of this case is that in a highly polarized racial voting environment, the outcome of Calais is that smart racists can win and dumb racists will lose. And what does that mean? The smart racist will be gerrymandering for. For racial reasons. But he'll never say that. He'll say it is because of partisanship, that they're Democrats. I'm trying to suppress or limit Democratic representation. That's what the smart racist will say. The dumb racist will say, well, we need fewer, you know, we need fewer black representatives and the game is up. Right.
- [15:10]
B
And my understanding is, was back in 1982, Congress clarified Article 2 of the Voting Rights act to make it Section 2. Yeah, Section 2. Sorry. To explicitly say you don't have to have evidence of racist motivation to rule a gerrymander as illegal or a violation of this statute. All you have to show is that the outcome results in
- [15:35]
A
not really. It's not just only outcome.
- [15:37]
B
Okay, so explain what happened in 82 and that and what's changed with this new ruling by the Supreme Court.
- [15:43]
A
So basically, as is often the case. We're looking at a section of the law that is not very well drafted. We can just read it. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973B, F2 of this title, etc. So let's stop there. It says no voting. No. No voting qualification or pre. Prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results in denial or abridgment. So not just denial. Right? Not just. You can't vote because of poll taxes. Abridgment. Okay, okay. So that means that's where you're talking about. Okay. This is broader than just denial. So then you get to section B. A violation of subsection A of the section is established if based on the totality of the circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the state or political subdivision are not equally open to participation, participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection A of this section and that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class may have been elected to office in the state or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered, provided that nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion.
- [17:37]
B
Okay, okay.
- [17:38]
A
What does that mean? What does that mean? It reminds me of that great line from Blades of Glory with Will Ferrell and Josh Heder where they're talking about the song My Humps by Black Eyed Peas is the. The song they're going to skate to in their pairs figure skating routine. And Will and Josh Eater says, nobody knows what that means. And Will Ferrell responds. Or. And Will Ferrell responds, nobody knows what it means, but it's provocative. It gets the people going. Well, yeah, yeah, nobody. This gets. Is provocative. It gets the people going. So what does this mean? It means that you can't abridge that. But also you cannot just look at the proportionate population and say that because say 35% of the let's of the congressional delegation isn't Black in a 35% Black state, then therefore you've proven A voting rights. So if proportional representation is not proof, but at the same time the members should have the same opportunity as other members of the electorate to participate and to elect representatives of their choice, how do you square that circle? How do you make that determination?
- [18:55]
B
So the ambiguity of the statute as written leads to all kinds of interpretive challenges. And it comes to the Supreme Court. They rule in Louisiana versus Calais. And there's been a lot of fury over this, depending on where. But we're also living in a moment where gerrymandering, it's taken on unbelievable proportions because first Texas does a mid decade redistricting, then California meets that. So both parties are doing this state by state by state, some are more successful than others. But then courts throw this option in and it's one thing to say, all right, if it say, has 35% black citizenship and it doesn't quite get to 35% black representation in its congressional delegation, okay, that's one thing. But to have zero black representation, can't you look at that and go, hey, there's something really screwed up in this system? Which brings me back to the. I mean I recognize and I understand why everyone is upset on the racial dynamics of this ruling, but why are we dealing with the root problem to begin with, which is how screwed up gerrymandering is in general? Like California is, I think around 35 or 40% Republican.
- [20:10]
A
Yeah.
- [20:11]
B
And it has nowhere near that many Republican representatives from its congressional delegation because things are gerrymandered to oblivion. So I want to deal with the bigger picture here. As part of the reason our politics have become so broken is because the American people are not actually sending their representatives to Congress anymore. Congress does not reflect the actual demographic or political leanings of the American people.
- [20:37]
A
Oh my goodness.
- [20:38]
B
Given that our country was founded on no taxation without representation, it's pretty weird
- [20:43]
A
that our two political parties have screwed
- [20:45]
B
up the district so much that the people are no longer represented by who gets sent to Washington.
- [20:51]
A
Sky you, you're right that. You're 120 right on that. So let's, let's back up a minute. The, the American government from the ground up has a lot of counter majoritarian elements to it. So it has the electoral College, it has a Supreme Court, it has a bill of rights so that even a majority of Americans can't abridge my free speech rights or your free speech rights.
- [21:15]
B
Even the Senate. Two. Even the Senate, two senators from every state, regardless of their size or population.
- [21:21]
A
It's counter majoritarian totally. So you know what Institution is not supposed to be counter majoritarian.
- [21:27]
B
The House of Representatives.
- [21:28]
A
Exactly. It is supposed. It's in the freaking name. Right. It is supposed to be representative of the population of the. It is supposed to be representative of the states. And by the way, you're not representative of the state if the state's 5545, say Republican, Democrat, and your congressional delegation is 90% Republican. Right.
- [21:49]
B
Or if it's 45, 35, what am I getting? My number 65, black and white.
- [21:54]
A
Right?
- [21:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like there should. I understand there's going to be some gray fuzziness on the edges of these things, but we're nowhere close to that at this point.
- [22:05]
A
Yeah, it. And so what's even worse is to do that you're creating a system where minority vote, a minority of number of votes can create, can elect a majority of your representatives. So some of these gerrymanders are so extreme that I've seen, you know, you could lose the popular vote. Like the Republicans could lose the popular vote in a heavily gerrymandered state or the Democrats could lose the popular vote in a heavily gerrymandered state and they're in their regions and still win a majority of the representatives, which is. That is a. At this point, you're basically really wondering, okay, how much of a democracy do we really have and how much is the fix in?
- [22:57]
B
It's very similar to what we've seen with the Electoral College when we have three presidential elections this century where the candidate who got, who lost the popular vote wins the presidency. I understand if that's going to happen occasionally, but three times in the first 24 years of this century, something's broken in our system, if that's what we're seeing with that regularity.
- [23:22]
A
Well, I mean, I think it's only two. Right. 2000 and 2016.
- [23:28]
B
Maybe you're right, it's 2016 and 16,
- [23:31]
A
but there was, in 24, Trump had a plurality of the popular. You're correct, but. Right.
- [23:38]
B
But it's still more frequent than at any previous time in American history.
- [23:42]
A
Right, right. And. And it, see, it feels more possible every year. Yes. I mean, every four years. And so we have a huge problem. And what makes this even worse, sky, is that it is a problem that really only has a political solution. But the people who are in politics, many of them owe their very existence as a, as a member of Congress in the House of Representatives to the gerrymander. Right. And so they know, they know if they do something about partisan gerrymandering, they're toast. They're just absolute toast. And you see it, by the way, they gerrymander now. So you'll see. For example, we just had a situation where a very credible challenger to a Republican representative, a very credible Democratic challenger, was gerrymandered out of his district, so that now he faces a stronger Republican than the one he was initially taking on. Because everything is being done in this unrelenting war of each against all to make sure that the hated other side doesn't win. And this is a super bipartisan problem, by the way.
- [24:46]
B
Yes, it absolutely is. And this is why I don't want to spend a majority of our time talking about what the Supreme Court decided as it relates to racial gerrymandering, as problematic as that may be. Because I think the ultimate solution to both racial gerrymandering and the political gerrymandering that's going on is gotta be broader than whatever the Supreme Court decision was. And they've already said, we're not getting involved in political gerrymandering because the Constitution is silent about this. And yet it seems to be a significant contributor to the breakdown of our political system. And so I wanted to pivot to then what might some solutions look like? And some people listening to this probably like, why are you guys talking about this political punditry when this is a Christian podcast and I'm supposed to be talking about spiritual things? I care about this in part because, honestly, I think it's the way we love our neighbors.
- [25:36]
A
It's a fundamental justice issue.
- [25:38]
B
That's right. When a significant portion of the American people do not have their perspective represented in our government, it's going to lead to increasing resentment, a breakdown of the system, a feeling like nothing works. And when you have that reach a critical point, then you cease to have a civil society anymore. That seems to be the course we are on. If we don't fix some of these underlying political problems. And right now we have two parties, as you said, they are disincentivized to change this because they owe their positions in power to this really broken dynamic. So it's going to have to come from outside of the parties, I believe, to fix it. But I wanted to pivot to what are the potential solutions.
- [26:20]
A
Yeah, it's a great question, which before I'm going to answer, can I just drill down on your other point for a moment? Sky. Christian podcasts that pay attention to politics. And not every Christian podcast should pay attention to politics, but Christian podcasts that pay attention to politics should be focusing on the key justice issues of our Time. And we've done a terrible job. We have done a terrible job cultivating Christian citizenship. If we basically say, well, if it's not abortion or religious liberty or trans or lgbt, then it's a second order issue.
- [26:58]
B
Crotch cross Christianity, as I call it.
- [27:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I have had this conversation so many times with people who are very active in sort of evangelical Christian political activism. And you know, I just recently had it where I was having a conversation and somebody said, as a Christian, how could you have voted for Kamala Harris? And the first thing I went to were my two big takeaways, which was number one, Ukraine, number two, rule of law in the US And I could just watch their eyes glaze over like,
- [27:28]
B
Christians don't care about that. Yeah, yeah, why bother?
- [27:31]
A
And then we immediately pivot to talking about like pronouns or something like that or whatever, you know, and so you're, you're in this world where I'm not saying we shouldn't care about religious liberty, abortion. I mean, I've been a religious liberty and a pro life attorney my entire life and career. I've dedicated countless hours, but in no time as I thinking those are the only issues, the only issues that Christians should be concerned about. And so this, this weird world that we live in where somehow fundamental issues of justice and like, might I remind everyone, Micah 6:8 says, act justly, love, kindness, walk humbly. Fundamental justice issues, which, you know, maybe the answers on them are hard and tough and we won't all, all Christians won't agree on them. Like, we'll have differing opinions, but we're both, we're all concerned about justice and to, to sort of say, well, you know, let's, let's put it this way, at no point would you have thought, well, let me take a break and say we're going to, I know this is a Christian podcast, but we're going to keep talking about abortion. Right? That would not come to your mind. But to say, I know this is a Christian podcast, but we're going to talk about X or y, other public policy issue. And I'm not equating gerrymandering an abortion. I'm not saying they're exactly the same in gravity, but I am saying that a Christian can be concerned and should be concerned about both. And this idea that, that there's this very narrow set of issues that that's what defines Christian engagement and everything else is a kind of, who cares? So what, Whatever, don't talk to me about that by comparison. It's just completely off it's completely wrong.
- [29:14]
B
I know.
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A
I mean. But okay.
- [29:15]
B
To draw that comparison out a little bit more though, if you are a Christian and let's say you're a conservative pro life Christian and you happen to live in a predominantly blue state, your values and views are probably not being represented in Congress.
- [29:31]
A
Oh, no.
- [29:32]
B
Yeah, right. So you should care about gerrymandering because wouldn't the country be better off if you're a conservative pro life Christian in California if the delegation from California included people that actually represented your views? And you don't want the Democrats redrawing the districts to exclude your views? That's what this country was founded on. And yet these political parties, again, they're both doing it, have rigged the system against the people. So to get to those higher level issues, if you believe one of those higher level issues is pro life kind of stuff, well, you need to have representatives in Congress that are gonna carry your views into those issues. But you're cutting it off at the source by allowing this kind of gerrymandering to go on. And the attitude tends to be, well, okay, I might be a conservative in California and my vote means nothing, but because they're doing it in Texas, at least the conservatives there are gonna make up for my lack of representation here. Okay? But that's not how the system is supposed to work. And ultimately it is going to lead to a lot of resentment. And you see it with the number of Americans who are no longer aligned with either political party, with those who are throwing up their hands believing the system is irredeemable. We need to give the people hope again that this system can be course corrected and that they should participate in it. But if we keep going down the road we're going, I worry that more and more people are going to disconnect from the ballot as a means of expressing their desires in the public square and they're going to turn to guns and bullets instead.
- [31:05]
A
Yes, I'm very, very worried about that. About the frustration with democracy leading to. Leading to more political violence. I. If, you know, one of the things about the American Constitution, the American system is, if you think about the American Constitution, it's built from the ground up as a, As a form of a dispute resolution process.
- [31:29]
B
Right.
- [31:30]
A
It is not an instrument, The American Constitution is not an instrument for your preferred policy positions or for your preferred political party. Okay. The American Constitution exists in many ways as a. As a means of welding together an enormous, diverse, fractious community. Right. And that enormous, diverse and fractious community, one of the ways in which you weld it together is by making people feel like they have a voice, even if they're in the minority. And so if you, if you have counter majoritarianism with a free speech clause, that helps give you a voice. But Even if you're say, 60, 40, but in, you're in a community of interest. This is a key term that I'll go back to. If you're in a community of interest, then you're going to have and. And that community should have a voice in American politics. And so let me, let me put it this way. One, everything I'm going to about to say, at the edges, it's going to be get vague and messy, okay? At the edges, it will always be vague and messy and require some political compromise. But the bottom line is the way that representation is supposed to occur is that communities of interest, if they have sufficient size, should be bound together. What do I mean? If I'm living in the middle of Nashville, my life, the interest, the issues in Nashville are very different from a lot of the issues, say in Pulaski, Tennessee, down I65, a very small town, rural county, rural community. These are two very different communities. They would be called different communities of interest. And so what you've often seen is that you'd see a city, cities have representatives, rural areas would have representatives, suburban areas would have representatives. All of these are distinct, different communities, different communities of interest. And they would, as a general matter, be sort of lumped together in a geographically cohesive, culturally cohesive whole. Okay? But what gerrymandering does is it says we don't give a flying flip about communities of interest. You know, what we care about. What we care about is just R and D, these two numbers, or B and W, black and white, or Republican and Democratic. And what we're going to do is we're going to minimize D and maximize R. And what that means, for example, in, in Tennessee, is they've cracked the big Democratic cities. So Nashville, Memphis, you have a ton of rural voters kind of reaching in and pulling out a slice of urban voters. Now, these rural voters and urban voters have very different interests. They have very different lives. Everything is very different about their existences. And yet we're saying that a minority of urban voters have to be carried along by majority of rural voters to prevent any Democrats from holding office. What you've done is that community of interest then has no representation. The city of Memphis, the second largest city in the US And I'm sorry, in Tennessee, the city of Nashville, the largest city In Tennessee, you don't have any representatives who are focused on Memphis or Nashville. That slice of their constituents is just a small part of their overall constituency. And by the way, if they cater to that Nashville part or that Memphis part, they'll lose. So it's even. It's. So it's just a nightmare.
- [35:13]
B
Yeah. And this, again, those who know their history, this is the irony is 250 years ago, the American colonies were a tiny sliver of the British Empire. And those colonies were upset because they were not having their interest fairly represented before the Crown in London. And the attitude of the Crown, the attitude of Parliament was, well, of course, we're taking your interests at heart because you're part of the Empire. But they didn't have anybody who was distinctly representing them before the Crown and before the interests of the government in London. And that is one of the factors that led to the American Revolution. We are doing the exact same thing in many of our states and cities. And we say it's okay because it's not personal. It's just politics. Well, and don't worry your representative. Sorry if you live in Nashville or Memphis, but your representative will. They'll have your interests at heart. Despite the fact that the majority of their voters are coming from outside those cities. What do you think's going to happen? Of course they're going to get neglected.
- [36:14]
A
It's even worse than that, Sky. We're doing it not because we're doing it. And then they're justifying it by saying the other side is evil and cannot be allowed to win.
- [36:22]
B
Right.
- [36:24]
A
That's what's rationalizing it to such an. So it's not just that, oh, we'll take care of you just fine. It's no, you are evil. You must be crushed. That is the mindset that is working here. Which, by the way, again, is the same mindset. You know, once the Crown saw, you know, the colonists getting rebellious, they just used a giant sledgehammer to try to suppress rebellion, suppress independence. And that's what we're doing. Not in the same way. It's not like we have red coats in people's homes, but we are using political sledgehammer after political sledgehammer to hit our opponents. And then if you say, hey, enough, stop, stop. Don't do this, well, then you're weak and you're a sucker. You're doing unilateral disarmament. You know the other side's going to do it. That's why I wrote a column not long ago highlighting this guy Shane Massey from South Carolina, where what I was wanting to do was because his speech was brilliant. It was brilliant. And I highlighted it because this is no squish rhino. This is a guy who in his speech paid tribute to John C. Calhoun. Like, what is one of the worst politicians in American history. I mean, this is a guy who said, I'm a rabid partisan Republican. Like in his seat, in his speech, he's referring to himself as a rabid partisan. And he's like, guys, we can't do this. If you try to create one party rule, if you try to crush another party, it's actually going to destroy you as well. This one party rule is terrible for the communities you govern and is terrible for the party that's the one party. Well, and so.
- [38:07]
B
Sorry, go ahead.
- [38:08]
A
Yeah. And so, you know, this idea that we have to crush and destroy our opposition, that if you keep doing this, it will fracture this country, I don't think it, I don't think it's a matter of a might fracture right now. It, we're not anywhere near that. It is a, you know, we got a long way to go and a lot more injustices to occur before it would reach that point. But we're headed down a road that is dark. It is dark.
- [38:35]
B
There were Republican representatives in Indiana that also stood up. And Donald Trump wanted Indiana to redistrict, to try to create more Republican districts, to gerrymander further and exclude Democratic representation in Indiana. And there were a handful of Republicans in Indiana that stood up and defied President Trump and said, no, we are not going to do this. And most of them lost their reelection bids. So we still seem to be barreling down this road of hatred of the other side to the point where we will cut off our nose to spite our face. But there are principled people who are trying to stand up and warn about this, but they're not winning the argument. Go ahead.
- [39:16]
A
I keep thinking our way through this is that there will come a time one way or the another where this log jam will break. That this 50, 50, 51, 49, whatever, it won't last forever. Now, there's a very dark way it breaks. One dark way that it breaks is we break. It breaks because we break apart, that we just don't sustain this republic. But in all likelihood, and all the odds are that it will break with one side or the other kind of getting a governing majority for maybe a generation. This is, this has happened throughout American history many times. And so the question is when there is the breakthrough and in One side does have a decisive majority. What do they do with it to make sure we don't go through something like this again? And to me, there's a sort of a list of constitutional reforms or legal reforms, and dealing with gerrymandering has got to be near the top of that list.
- [40:22]
B
Let's talk about what that could look like in an idealized future. So one of the more popular solutions, which I know former President Obama had spent some of his political capital after leaving office advocating for, is independent redistricting commissions. And some states have put these in place. California had it. Michigan, I think Arizona had it. So the idea that rather than allowing the state legislature to redraw the maps because they're all partisans, and that would lead to blue states creating more blue districts or red states, more red districts, put together this group of independent people, which people are rolling their eyes already, independent, nonpartisan commission that comes up with the map to make sure it's as fair as possible. One of the things I'm already going to say against this is California, as I said, had this in place. And then just last year they voted to get rid of it temporarily so they could gerrymander their districts more for Democrats because they were responding to Texas doing it. So even if you put an independent commission in place, it can be erased as soon as somebody gets super partisan in their politics again. And we're off to the same problem. So is independent commissions the right way to do this? Is it better than nothing?
- [41:38]
A
I would say you had. I, I think a com. Let me put it this way. An independent commission is better than what we have now, but not ideal. What it would be better is an independent commission very precisely guided by statutory guidelines. In other words, an independent commission that is required, required to group together communities of interest. And so, and, and to, to create an environment. Because here's the problem. There is a certain way in which proportional representation, or the concept of proportional representation here, let me back up and say it like this. There are certain way in which a 60, 40 kind of state would create a 100 to 0 representation, even with a independent redistricting commission. And that is where you have like near complete perfect marbling. In other words, all of the communities, whether it's urban, rural, suburban, they're kind of 60, 40, right? You, you're in, let's say it's Massachusetts. You're in Boston, Boston, 60, 40, all everyone's mixed together. And then you go out to Worcester, Worcester, 60, 40, then you go all the way out to the western part of the state in the mountains, it's 60, 40, you would have, if you're going to have the 40s just going to lose and lose and lose and lose. It's just math. But if you have a 6040 state where Boston is 90, 10 or 80, 20, and the western part of the state is 30, 70 or 20 80, Republican, whatever, then communities of interest will result in different kinds of representation. And so that's why it's very hard to sort of just look at the raw top line numbers and say if it's a 6040 state, it will always result if it's fairly drawn in a 6040 representation. No, it depends on how on these communities of interest, why it is in this deep south, black voters aren't just heavily of one political party, they're also hyper concentrated geographically. So you have communities of interest here. The city of New Orleans is a heavily black city. It's also a community of interest, for example. And so that's kind of why this gets difficult. One way to sort of cut the Gordian knot is just do you know proportional representation or sort of statewide rank choice voting concepts, etc. There are other ways to do it. But if you're going to do district based representation as opposed to state proportional representation, district based, in my view, the fairest way to do it is by putting together these communities of interest.
- [44:25]
B
Okay, two others I want to talk about before we wrap this up, one you're kind of hinting at, and this is one that intrigues me, multi member districts with ranked choice voting. Have you heard of this model before? So the idea would be instead of creating a district with one representatives, one representative elected by that district, you'd create larger districts and each one elects 2, 3, 4, 5 representatives from that larger district. But they're selected through ranked choice voting. So a voter walks into the voting booth and maybe there's a list of 10 candidates on there, both Republicans and Democrats, and everyone picks their top three. And out of that you get three representatives for that one district. But it's more likely that you're gonna get a mix of both Republican and Democratic representatives in proportion to the political makeup of that larger district. So it's a way of getting proportional representation, but you no longer have a single voice representing a single district.
- [45:30]
A
Yeah, I'm open to that. Like I'm intrigued by that idea. Let me tell you when I'm even more open and actually really, really advocate because I think it deals with a lot of problems at one time. Expand the House.
- [45:43]
B
This is my favorite one too. I Don't understand why we're not doing this. Talk about the history of this a little bit. Because it isn't like this is without precedent. This is what we did for most of American history.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the current number of, of Representatives, and a lot of people don't really realize this, the current number is not fixed by the Constitution. The number that are currently Representatives in the House. This is not a fixed constitutional ratio. So that as the population expands, it grows higher or nor is it a fixed number in the House, so that you need a constitutional amendment to change the composition of the House.
- [46:18]
B
Right. The House decides this themselves. Correct.
- [46:22]
A
It would be a matter of law. Right, yeah, yeah.
- [46:25]
B
So throughout American history, as the country expanded, as the population grew, we created more districts and had more representatives in Congress. But that stopped in 1929, I think
- [46:37]
A
something in that neighborhood, and I believe in the 1920s. And so you were steadily. Because one of the reasons, remember this is called the House of Representatives, this was designed to be close to the people. Well, now, you know, you might have an 800,000 person district. That means that a member of Congress, you'll probably never see them unless you go and seek them out. And you know, and many of them cancel town halls now because they get too contentious. And so the, the lack of constituent service, that lack of direct engagement with your legislator has meant that, you know, the population of the United States in 1920 was a fraction of the population. Now. It was, I'll look it up right now, the population of the US in 2020 or in 1920, 2020, it's about 330 million. 1920, it is 100 million.
- [47:30]
B
Yeah. So one third.
- [47:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, one third. So Representatives were representing one third the number of people that they currently represent. And so if you just increase the House to go with, let's just say that ratio, a couple of things happen. Number one, you're closer to your legislator. Your legislator has to be more immediately responsive. Number two, it becomes much more difficult to gerrymander. I mean, you can still gerrymander, but at some point the math just gets really hard to carve it all up, even computer and AI assisted. And all of this just makes it harder to gerrymander. Number three, I think this is important and not enough people focus on this. It makes being a member of Congress
- [48:14]
B
less prestigious, which is why it's not happening. Because it doesn't benefit the people who currently have power. It dilutes their power.
- [48:21]
A
It restores the concept. I think it gets us closer to the idea of the Citizen, legislator, somebody who does it for a period of time as a matter of public service. But it doesn't necessarily become a career, maybe for leadership, maybe for the people who can progress through the system. But it, you know, a member of Congress becomes a less prestigious person. And, and one of the reasons why we have so much trouble right now is the prestige of this office is such that people cling to these like they're clinging to their lives, because it is, it defines sort of who they are and their place and their stature in this world. And so there are other benefits to it as well. But expand the House is one of my favorite because it deals with a lot of problems at once.
- [49:07]
B
Okay, so based on our prior conversations on various political topics, I think you and I have talked about the need to have an amendment that clarifies and amends the pardon power of the President. We have talked about the need for term limits for justices on the Supreme Court. And now we've talked about the need to expand the House of Representatives. And maybe that's an act of Congress. More likely it would come through a constitutional amendment that specifies how many people a representative can represent and then grow the House accordingly as the country grows in population. Those three reforms alone would go a long way to fixing a lot of our political problems. And perhaps the gerrymander fix would be the most immediately restorative.
- [50:01]
A
Yeah, and I think what's really important about this is a lot of people look at the text of the Constitution and say, or the way things are and say, well, you're not respecting the wisdom of the Founders. And what I would say to this is, no, we're actually trying to put in place the wisdom of the Founders. So put it like this. If the Founders believed that we needed a House of Representatives to be the most purely representative branch of government or part of the legislative branch, and it's not, then to obtain the vision, to realize the vision of the Founders, you would need to make a change. And that's why they have an amendment process. They didn't think that they were hand coming down from Mount. You know, they, they were not coming down from the Mount with the. The Constitution on stone tablets written by God. They had a series of philosophical ideas about what government should do and how it should be accountable to the people. And the 1787 Constitution was their best guess at how to make that happen against the background of a lot of messy compromises that had to be arrived at to, to knit that country together. And then they put in the amendment process because they knew they didn't get it all right. They didn't get it all perfect.
- [51:20]
B
I don't remember who it was. I heard some historian recently was asked if the founders were able to come back to our time and look at what we've made of the government and of our system, what would surprise them most? And the historian said that we haven't amended the Constitution more frequently.
- [51:35]
A
Completely agree with that. Completely agree.
- [51:37]
B
And you're right, they put that system in place because they knew they couldn't anticipate what issues would face this country in future generations. So they gave us a means of amending it. Again, to your point, our system of government was created to take an incredibly diverse, geographically spread out, pluralistic society and give it a means of negotiating its differences without taking up the sword. And one of those is the amendment process of the Constitution. And there were times in our history where we came very close to breaking up this union. And in order to preserve it, we amended the Constitution, 13th, 14th, 15th amendment, the second founding, some call it. We might be getting to that place again. I don't know if we're going to take up a sword against one another, if we're going to break apart, but our political system is so broken that the will of the people is incapable of being accomplished. And if we don't amend the Constitution in some of the ways that you've talked about, then we're just choosing to end this experiment in democracy.
- [52:37]
A
I, I gave a speech recently at Hampden Sydney College in Virginia, which is this lovely men's college. It's one of the few men's colleges left in America. It's really lovely place. And the theme of the talk was does America need a third founding? So we had the first founding, 1787 constitute. It was a process. Let's say first founding begins with declaration. It begins with the shot that the shot heard around the world. The philosophical basis for it is the Declaration of Independence. The legal operative document is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And the, the judicial ratification of it is Marbury versus Madison. I look at that as like if there's a. An essay with a beginning, a middle and an end that it's shot heard round the world to Marbury versus Madison. First founding, second founding, shot heard around the world. The attack on Fort Sumter. What was the philosophical basis for the second founding? The Gettysburg Address. What was the legal operative document of the second founding? Civil War Amendments. What was the judicial ratification of the second founding? Brown versus Board. Now, you know the problem there that the distance between the ratification of the constitutional amendments, the actual legal documents and the judicial ratifications. Almost 100 years.
- [54:02]
B
Could you even argue that the. The ratification is partly 1964, 65, with the civil rights legislation. And a lot of people would argue we didn't really become a representative democracy until 1965 with the reforms we started out talking about with the Voting Rights act, which enfranchised a lot of black citizens that couldn't otherwise vote.
- [54:23]
A
Yeah, but each founding you can point to a beginning, sort of a philosophical argument, legal documents, judicial ratification. So what would a third founding do? The third founding, maybe the shot heard around the world is the January 6th riot. You know, this is a sign that we are. Our republic is under an. That does not happen in a healthy republic. Period. Period. So what's the philosophical foundation for it? We don't have it yet. What are the legal operative documents? We don't have them yet. But I would say that we're in a position where in many ways what the third founding has to do with is go rediscover the purpose of the first founding, which was to establish a republican form of government. We have a quasi monarchical presidency now. We have an inert legislature now we have an overly mighty judicial branch, mainly because of the abdication of the legislative branch and the assertions of power of the executive branch. The system is not what was intended and we're all feeling the strain.
- [55:27]
B
One of the things I find interesting, I love that framework, David, but one of the things I find interesting is when you look at the first founding, there's a monarchy, a lack of representation of the people that we rebel against. You look at the second founding, there's a different kind of monarchy. It's not a monarchy. It's an oligarchy of white plantation owning southern aristocrats who have an economic interest in keeping a significant part of the population in slavery. And we saw that as utterly inconsistent with the ideals of this country. And enough of us mobilized to end that and put things in place to change it. So what is the. To make it clear who's the enemy now?
- [56:05]
A
Well, it's, it is. I would say that the enemy. Let's move it. Remove it from Donald Trump. I would say the enemy of the American republic right now is Article 1. I mean, I'm sorry, Article 2 of the Constitution. The presidency, what the presidency has become. And it is becoming more King George like. And, and, and right now it's accelerating in that. Think about the Trump slush fund, for example. I, I wrote about it recently where I said that it is the most monarchical thing that Trump has done in his already monarchical presidency. Because if you think about what he did is he subverted Article 1, the legislature, by misappropriating funds for a slush fund. And then he subverts Article 3 of the Judiciary by creating a parallel system of justice that benefits maga. So normally if I have a claim against the federal government, I have to jump through ridiculous legal hoops through the Federal Tort Claims act, or if it's like a pure civil rights claim, I might just be completely out of luck because of all of the web of federal immunities. But now if I'm MAGA, Mike, I can circumvent Article 3, I can use funds that were yanked from Article 1, and I can go into special MAGA court and make my claim for dollars and get it. That's monarchical.
- [57:28]
B
Okay, I agree with you, but I want to push you further. Okay, I absolutely agree with everything you're saying about the Article 2 craziness of the presidency these days. And it's not unique to Donald Trump. It had been growing for years. I think when you take it a step deeper though, there's a reason it got to this point. There are forces behind the adjustment of the ineptitude of Congress and the empowerment of the Article 2 branch of the government. And in both cases it has benefited the political parties because if you are a Democrat or a Republican, you benefit when your president gets elected. You have almost unilateral power at that point because you can bypass Congress and you can control the courts. So both political parties, when they've gotten the presidency, have increased the strength of the presidency because it's out of self interest, cuz they don't have to wrangle through all the complications of Congress. That's the same power structure that's led to all the gerrymandering that we spent most of this podcast talking about. It's in the party's political interest to do this. So when I look at who's the enemy right now that we need to wrestle this country back from, in my mind it's two groups, maybe three, but two One, it's the political parties themselves who've benefited from this very broken system and corrupted the constitutional structure that we inherited for their own entrenchment of their own power. That's number one. And then number two, I think it's the tech oligarchs who are manipulating media and the algorithms and the technology to keep this country divided in a way that benefits them. And makes us turn on one another. If we can get our hands around those two problems, the entrenchment of political power with these two parties and the way they've codified that in the executive branch and the tech oligarchs and the way they are abusing their power to diminish the values and non constitutional structures that actually created the possibility of a flourishing representative government. Those two things need to be fixed if we're going to have a new birth of freedom in this country. We. I don't think you do it by just fixing one side or the other. They go together.
- [59:38]
A
Yeah. So I. The one thing I agree with you and disagree with you about the political parties. So on the one hand, partisanship is more important than it's ever been and the parties are weaker than they've been. So the party is a party apparatus mainly exists to facilitate whatever personalities are in charge. Yes. And so, but so the real problem is the partisanship. In other words, that if I am a Republican, I am utterly entrenched. And so therefore. And then if I've grown up in the modern generation, I've grown up in a modern generation where the purest expression of my partisanship comes through the presidential election. And then once my partisanship is expressed through the presidential election and my candidate wins, my singular priority is that everyone else needs to support that guy. Right. Or if my candidate loses, then everything needs to be directed against that guy. And so the really the parties as entities have become neutered in. So for example, if you had strong parties where who were screening candidates, right.
- [60:49]
B
You don't get a Donald Trump nominated,
- [60:51]
A
you don't get a Trump.
- [60:52]
B
I agree.
- [60:53]
A
You don't get a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Lauren Boebert, like we can Graham Platner in Maine, like we can go down the line, line of this. And I know there's downsides to that kind of. But if you had a party strong enough to say everyone has to go through a bank, a back, a background check, everyone has, if anyone has any pending sexual harassment claims they're not eligible to run, like just basic stuff like basic screeners, like an HR department would use. Like I was arguing with a good friend of mine on a podcast earlier today about Graham Platner and I said, look, here's my deal. If a guy, if he's a candidate, say to be assistant manager of the restaurant where you work and you find all of these posts from the recent past that were just in this Nazi tattoo that he just only covered after he applied for the job you would say, I don't know if I want to work with that guy, but then he runs for Senate and you're like, well, I mean, lesser of two evils.
- [61:52]
B
I agree with you entirely on this, David. I think the parties have gotten much, much, much weaker. And there was a time where the smoke filled rooms, despite all their problems, filtered out terrible candidates in a way that our current nominating system and primaries don't, especially when they're closed primaries. I get that. So maybe the argument isn't that it's the party structures that are abusing their positions as much as it is the party structure is a massive obstacle to the changes that we all know need to be made, whether it's in gerrymandering or getting Congress to actually do its job. It's so much easier. Like water takes the path of least resistance. Political power takes the path of least resistance. And the least resistance is, let's just consolidate all that power in the executive branch, get our person in there every four years, hopefully, and then no one else has to do anything. We can just go on cable news and rake in the donor dollars. But that system isn't going to change until you get partisans willing to change it, and they're not. So we need to bypass that. And I think it's going to the people with these amendments, state by state.
- [62:59]
A
Well, you know, I think if people think it's ludicrous and totally unrealistic to think that Congress can be more representative, in our lifetimes, it's been so much more representative. You know, when I was a lot of people, this would shock people to know this now, but Ronald Reagan never had a House majority.
- [63:20]
B
Yeah.
- [63:21]
A
There was never a Republican House majority, but he was able to push through massive pieces of legislation. Why? Because the parties, even within them, had different coalitions. So that the Southern Democrat was very different from the Midwestern Democrat, the Northeastern Republican was very different from the Western Republican. And you could form coalitions. Why? Because the different constituencies were represented by cohesive. I'm not saying there was no gerrymandering. Of course there were some. But as a general matter, what you had was a legislator would look and say, what is benefiting the people of my district? That was always in their mind, along with, of course, what does my party want?
- [64:06]
B
But doesn't this go along with. I think it was Tip o', Neill, speaker of the House in that era, who said, all politics is local.
- [64:12]
A
Yeah.
- [64:12]
B
And with the advent of digital technology and media and algorithms, all politics has become national.
- [64:20]
A
Yeah.
- [64:21]
B
Right. So instead of thinking about who's my representative and how can they represent my interests or my community's interest in Congress. We're just thinking about will my representative support the president that I like.
- [64:31]
A
Exactly.
- [64:32]
B
That's it. So everything becomes nationalized and it's just D's versus R's again, going back to the gerrymander thing. So that takes me to that other group of villains in this story, which are the companies that have created an ecosystem, a media ecosystem, which penalizes nuance and thoughtfulness and grabs people's attentions and stirs them with fear and anger and resentment.
- [64:56]
A
Well, and also what's unspoken in all of this is none of this would work if we weren't happy for it to work. That millions and millions, this is a structure that millions and millions of Americans get great meaning and purpose from. Not a majority. I mean, two thirds plus of Americans are largely disengaged. But in the end, it kind of comes down to us. But I still think there are some constitutional reforms that you can undertake that would make a great deal of difference. Yes, they wouldn't fix everything. The thing that we have forgotten about democracy is that it's the worst form of government, except for every other one. And sky, this leads me to another thing that I've been thinking a lot about. You know, the rise of authoritarianism. You know, you see, like, you see people who, young people who now who unabashedly say they're communist, right? Hey, I'm communist.
- [65:52]
B
Or the number who now say political violence is, is justifiable.
- [65:56]
A
Political violence is justifiable. The number of young people on the right who are flirting with hits or Hitler apologists and the Nick Fuentes movement, right? And you're sitting here thinking what we are in the middle of is the great forgetting that they've. Everyone has grown up in this, you know, who's say, 35 and younger has grown up in a world in which liberal democracy had no competitors. You know, we weren't fighting Soviet communism, we weren't fighting fascism. And so you're living in liberal democracy, which is always going to be messy. And we've been living through an even more messy time than usual. And so a lot of people who've never experienced or know about the alternatives that have been tried and failed in oceans of blood are looking at all the messiness of our democracy. And they're going, huh, huh. I wonder if, you know, Marx was onto something or did Mussolini and maybe even Hitler have some idea? You know, you're starting to get this great frame forgetting of the Alternatives. And I think it's incumbent on us. We got to make this system work better to keep cynical eyes from strailing into authoritarian places.
- [67:14]
B
That's a great point and it fits very much with the point I've made frequently about the people who are walking away from Christian faith and we can wrap up with this. A lot of the people I've talked to who are disillusioned with Christianity, I start asking them about their experience of Christianity. And I'm thinking I would be disillusioned with that too, because what you're describing is not the Christianity of the Christ. I know in the New Testament you're reacting to the horrible toxic ness of maybe it's mega church American evangelicalism or something else. And I'm like, yeah, I would walk away from that too. Have you ever actually read the Gospels and really marinated in what the New Testament is saying? They're not rejecting the true Christ, they're rejecting the false Christ of the culture in which they grew up in. Similarly, rather than saying, well, democracy and liberalism is terrible and we need to go to a different model. An illiberalism Christian Caesar, an authoritarianism, a communism, a Marxism, whatever it might be, it's like the thing you're rejecting, I want to reject too, because it is broken and it's not working. But the solution is not one of these terrible alternatives. The solution is a return to the core principles of liberal democracy. Yeah, I think they just haven't seen it. They don't think it's plausible.
- [68:32]
A
Exactly. I would say three messages. Number one, we have to do better. Like turning to young people and acknowledge it is not the way it should be. Number one, we have to do better. But number two, young. Youngins, young folks, it will never be perfect.
- [68:50]
B
Right.
- [68:50]
A
Liberal democracy is not utopian. It is not. It is. It accommodates all the messiness of human sinfulness and behavior. And we, you know, so there's always a muddling through element of liberal democracy that is just baked into the system. This gets to the Churchill quote worst compared to all the others. Number three, we shouldn't have to endure the hell of authoritarianism to reject it again. And I think just these three things we can do better. We will never be perfect. And authoritarianism has tried and failed. Don't go down that road. Those three things, if we can get that right, I think we got some hope to try.
- [69:30]
B
It sounds like we needed to add a fourth constitutional amendment. And that is something about the required teaching of history and civics in American schools again, because everything you just described would come if people had a deeper understanding of our own. Own history and the. The way our government was intended to function.
- [69:49]
A
Hey, Sky, I have a. I have an idea for a slow news month, French Friday.
- [69:54]
B
Okay.
- [69:56]
A
Let's just talk about the constitutional amendments that could help save this republic.
- [70:00]
B
Let's do it. We'll draft them together. You're an attorney. You know this stuff. I'll brainstorm. We'll draft them together, and then we just circulate them throughout the country.
- [70:07]
A
Absolutely. Let's get going. Okay.
- [70:09]
B
That would be a fun workshop. I would totally be in that. We could maybe we will brainstorm it offline sometime when we get together. David, thank you for your time today. We had a whole nother thing I wanted to get to, which, like usual, we didn't. But I'm just. I'm tickled to death that the Pope quoted Gandalf in his. In his first encyclical. I mean, what a world in a time we are living in.
- [70:32]
A
I mean, and it was a wonderful quote.
- [70:35]
B
It was. And even the broader context of what he wrote around it was. It was so good.
- [70:41]
A
All right. So good.
- [70:41]
B
We'll cover that on another. Another episode, perhaps. But look forward to our next conversation. David, thanks for being here.
- [70:48]
A
Thanks so much, Sky.
- [70:51]
B
French Friday is a production of Holy Post Media featuring David French and me, Sky Giotani music and theme song by Phil Vischer. This show is made possible by Holy Post patrons. To find out how you can become a Holy Post patron and to find more common good Christian content, go to holypost.com.