Dick Simpson-The Crisis in America's Democracy

Show Transcript

Dr. Dick Simpson: The Crisis in America’s Democracy

[00:00:00] Bob Gatty: Our nation is deeply divided along so many lines, racially, politically, economically. Unbelievably, it's even possible that a twice impeached former president, who's been indicted multiple times, including for trying to overturn his election defeat, actually could reach the presidency again. Hate among various groups has grown dramatically and is one of the many factors contributing to the mass shootings we're experiencing today.

[00:00:29] We're living in troubled times for our democracy and that's our topic today. So stay with us. 

[00:00:35] Our guest today, Dr. Dick Simpson, has spent more than five decades as a legislator, campaign strategist, and government advisor, including serving as an alderman in the city of Chicago, a city known for hardball politics.

[00:00:51] We'll get his views on all of this. Dr. Simpson's the author of Democracy's Rebirth, The View from Chicago. With meticulous analysis and pragmatic recommendations, Dr. Simpson navigates the intricate web of political, racial, economic, And social disparities that are shaping our nation's destiny. The relevance of his work extends beyond the local context, making it a pivotal resource for anyone invested in the revitalization of democracy.

[00:01:26] Dr. Simpson, thanks for joining us today on the Lean to the Left podcast. 

[00:01:30] Dick Simpson: I'm delighted to do so, Bob..

[00:01:32] Bob Gatty: Could you please provide us with a brief overview of democracy's rebirth, the view from Chicago, and the inspiration behind it? 

[00:01:43] Dick Simpson: As probably your listeners have intuited, there's been a decline in democracy worldwide.

[00:01:50] In 2020, 45 countries had lost ground towards autocracy instead of gaining ground towards democracy. And of course, we visited, we've seen that in, in the United States, particularly with the insurrection of January 2021 and with the ongoing crisis, barely having a Congress that's functional today and so many others.

[00:02:16] But I wanted to go beyond the headlines, and I wanted to do it in two ways. One, I wanted to look at the national crises, and there were a series of them, income and racial inequality, systemic racism, but corruption. low levels of participation in politics and government, the polarization, which has caused us to have a politics of resentment going on and several others.

[00:02:42] And I wanted to also see how they played out at a local level. And I chose the city of Chicago because that's what I've known and written about for decades. And I found both happening. And I also then applied what political scientists produced as alternatives to the various forms of democracy and the problems of democracy that we have.

[00:03:07] And so that's what put the book together. 

[00:03:10] Bob Gatty: So what aspects of Chicago's history and political landscape make it a pertinent case study for understanding the challenges of building a multiracial, multiethnic democracy? 

[00:03:22] Dick Simpson: One way of putting it, is that we're the epitome of Chicago politics.

[00:03:29] And it's just like the national politics, but more like many parts of the country, we've had machine politics. We've we are the most segregated city in North America. We are the most corrupt metropolitan region in North America. So this makes it easy to look at the problem in its more extreme case.

[00:03:50] And to see how it affects us, I'll just give you one example. There are so many. The middle class. in Chicago is shrinking like it is in the country. So back 30 years ago, 48 percent of all of our census tracts were middle class. Today, I think most people would be surprised to know, only 16 percent are middle class.

[00:04:11] We have lost the middle class from Chicago. Jefferson and others thought if we didn't have a middle class, we wouldn't have a democracy. And that's one example how looking at why this happened in Chicago and what the arguments are nationally for restoring the middle class is worthwhile. 

[00:04:31] Bob Gatty: your book delves into the complexities of money and politics.

[00:04:36] How has this issue contributed to the current Democratic crisis.

[00:04:41] Dick Simpson: One of the biggest political problems we have as a country is the corruption that comes from the wealthy and the corporations, both able to buy candidates in campaign contributions, but also to lobby. So for campaign contributions, the, what the wealthy give and the corporations give way outweigh the individual small donors and determine a number of the races.

[00:05:09] And obviously, congressmen or others who get elected from their money have to be responsive to their demands. In addition, in lobbying, I don't remember the exact figure from the book, but it's something like the business lobbyists are 16 times bigger than the, say, the labor or community group or the civic organization lobbies on Capitol Hill.

[00:05:33] And that's true at the Statehouse as well. 

[00:05:35] Bob Gatty: Okay. Money talks, BS walks, I guess is the way it is. Low voter participation is a concern across the nation. What are the underlying reasons for this trend and how can we encourage greater engagement? After all, we're at a time when the safety and accuracy of our electoral process is being challenged by those who refuse to accept defeat.

[00:06:03] Dick Simpson: Yes, we have a serious problem. Let me cover it in three ways. So first of all, I guess the good news is the voting level is going up. At my own university, we went from 42 percent of the students voting, 54 percent in the next presidential election in 2016, to 67 percent in the last election in 2020.

[00:06:26] And the same was true in the off year elections because we did a better job of civic engagement education than we had ever done in the history of our university. And that was happening throughout the country in many different ways. But two things drive the boat. One is that it has to be competitive.

[00:06:44] That is, when you have one party districts or one party states there's no reason to turn out. You already know the outcome of the election, so if it's not competitive, it doesn't matter. Second thing is there has to be a difference. And for good or for bad, we have a lot of difference between the candidates and the parties at this point.

[00:07:04] But all of this is part of what I lead to in the last of the book, which is we need more than participation on election day. We need to revitalize our democracy in two fundamental ways, and we need a new movement to do it. The first way is more participation in local government. For instance, Chicago does not have neighborhood government.

[00:07:25] We have elected officials from neighborhoods, but we don't have any ability for citizens to weigh in on policy. Same thing as many suburbs are basically no longer participatory in their decision making about policies. So we have the examples like the New England Town Meeting and others. We know how to do it, but we're in need to build up a demand to do it.

[00:07:48] The second level for higher offices, a congressman now represents 750, 000 people. They'd have no idea what those people really want or what their interests are. We've been doing experiments as political scientists where we got congressmen to meet with a representative sample from their district around a single issue like immigration.

[00:08:12] Could be any of the controversial issues of the day. And both the congressman and the 100 citizens who participated in each of those sessions found them to be much more enlightening and useful than say the town hall meetings where everybody shouts at each other. Okay. 

[00:08:30] Bob Gatty: Now you mentioned a minute ago, the politics of resentment, which is discussed in your book.

[00:08:38] How has that played out in recent years, including among Donald Trump's MAGA supporters? 

[00:08:45] Dick Simpson: That's what as a fundamental difference. Even before Trump, we had States like Wisconsin where there was a division and the people in small towns felt that the people in the big cities and the government weren't listening to their needs and their concerns.

[00:09:01] And so it began to be identity politics rather than issue politics. This is really magnified with the Trump supporters and the anti Trump supporters. Often, particularly with the Trump supporters, they label anyone who's a liberal or anyone who holds different views, even within the Republican Party, even among other conservatives

[00:09:22] as a traitor. We can't have politics where we're calling each other traitors. We have to have a politics that is at least civil enough for us to debate and deliberate in a meaningful fashion. And we have begun to hit a very deadly spiral that we have to correct. That's one of the reasons for suggesting more democracy, but under good guidelines that make it work functionally well and don't allow just yelling and screaming at each other.

[00:09:53] Bob Gatty: And Dr. Simpson, is this recent episode with Republicans having such a hard time picking a speaker an illustration of what we're talking about here? 

[00:10:04] Dick Simpson: Yes, indeed. In fact, it's beginning to look like the Republican Party may in fact divide and split. Permanently. The last time we had that kind of change in the United States was in 1860, just before the Civil War, when the Whig Party went out of existence, because they wouldn't deal with slavery, and the Republican Party came into existence.

[00:10:27] It is a time of too much polarization, and when you cannot even be considered a mainstream Republican conservative as being legitimate then we have a real crisis on our hands because you have a small minority that's becoming ever more autocratic and despotic and Unwilling to participate in normal discourse in our democracy.

[00:10:54] Bob Gatty: Yeah, it's very concerning. Now, political corruption is a recurring issue in the public eye. You're from a city that's known for political corruption over the years. How can we tackle this challenge to restore trust in our democratic institutions, Dr. Simpson? 

[00:11:17] Dick Simpson: It takes about 10 steps, but let me first lay the groundwork.

[00:11:20] In Illinois, since 1976, we've had more than 2, 150 public officials go to federal prison for corruption. Oh. They've been tried in court. Over 1, 800 of them come from the Chicago metropolitan area. We not only have corruption in the, say, the city council, where 37 have gone to prison and another three are currently on trial, but we also have corruption in all the branches of government, including the courts, over time, and we've had to try and begin to deal with it.

[00:11:56] One step we've taken as a state, besides just convicting people and sending them to jail, has been to pass a law requiring civic engagement education in the eighth grade and high school. We think in part that it's going to take a generation. We have to teach a new generation of students the cost of corruption what the cause of corruption is, which is most often a kind of machine politics that makes it easy to do corruption as a side effect, and finally the cures for corruption, of which there are a number of individual steps.

[00:12:32] And it varies a little bit by state and city, what kinds of laws have to pass, but in general, we have to focus on corruption. Lemme just give one other figure. Now, worldwide and in Illinois, worldwide, we lose a trillion dollars a year to corruption. A trillion, not billion or not million. In Illinois alone, we pay $500 million more in taxes for corruption. That's how much the corruption is costing us as a state every year. This is not a one time cost. 

[00:13:03] Bob Gatty: Wow. Okay. Now you said that structural problems are at the heart of our democracy struggles. What are some of the key structural issues that you see and what practical steps can we take to address them?

[00:13:20] Dick Simpson: So we take the example of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is non democratic. It weights towards the smaller states and gives them more votes in the Electoral College. But it also means that the popular vote and the electoral college vote often don't match. It's been five times now that someone has been elected president but lost the majority vote of the country and that's not healthy.

[00:13:47] So the way some people talk about a constitutional amendment and that would be fine but difficult to do. We're on the verge of having states sign a contract, pass a law that if the majority of the states or the states holding a majority of electoral votes agree, they will give their electoral votes not proportionally according to how many votes they got in a state, but they will give their votes according to what the national vote is, which means it would be the same as if we were voting directly nationally on the President. This would change. It. It takes only about four more states to agree to the compact to have it come into effect. Often the structural problems have workarounds. Take the other example of the Senate filibuster, and for that matter, the hold that has been preventing the appointment of military officers and others.

[00:14:39] Those are often not even rules. They're certainly not laws, they're not even rules. They're traditions. in the body. You have the same thing in the House where they require that by practice now that a majority of the majority party congressmen must agree to move legislation forward. So if you come forward with gun control or climate change or some major controversial issue, The chances of getting, say, the Republicans, who are the majority currently, to have a majority who agree with that is almost nil.

[00:15:13] And therefore, legislation is being blocked, which is, which the majority of both chambers favor but can't pass. Those are examples of structural problems. All of them have relatively straightforward, easy solutions and workarounds. 

[00:15:30] Bob Gatty: Do you feel that the Electoral College should be scrapped?

[00:15:34] Dick Simpson: That's one alternative. I just think it's so hard to pass a constitutional amendment to do that, that it's better to go ahead and pass the legislation in each state that makes it possible for the majority vote to maintain. Yes, we could get rid of the electoral college, but that would take either a constitutional convention or a constitutional amendment.

[00:15:54] And for practical reasons, that's not likely at the moment. 

[00:15:57] Bob Gatty: Yeah, what about the filibuster? 

[00:16:00] Dick Simpson: Filibuster could be stopped tomorrow morning. It takes a vote of the Senate itself. 

[00:16:04] Bob Gatty: Yeah the likelihood of that is, 

[00:16:08] Dick Simpson: well, it's going up because the Senate, while it's not as dysfunctional as the House is significantly dysfunctional.

[00:16:15] The Senate itself is undemocratic. That is the small states have more votes in the Senate than they ought to have in proportion to their, to the size of the state. But that's a problem that would take a constitutional amendment or constitutional convention. And that would be very hard to achieve.

[00:16:34] Bob Gatty: Yeah, okay. Now you're all about inspiring individuals to contribute to the strengthening of democratic institutions. What role does education play in this process? 

[00:16:48] Dick Simpson: I think education is central and we've been doing actually a lot about it. Let me just give you a few examples. I talked about the law we passed in Illinois and some other states.

[00:16:57] We have the American Political Science Association published now four books on how to teach civic engagement and practices that will engage students they need to practice doing, not just listen to lectures, it's the short version of that and there are plenty of ways to do that. So We've solved the intellectual or the practical problem like syllabi and those things.

[00:17:22] We just need to implement them. As I mentioned, just on voting, once you implement them, there's a drastic change immediately in the outcome in terms of student participation. There are other things that we need to do. I think people are discouraged. They think their vote doesn't count. They think the government has run badly.

[00:17:41] They think every government official is a crook. It's not a simple one step to be able to do everything, but education is very important. There's one major bill that didn't get completely reintroduced in this Congress, but was introduced in the last two, which is the Secure Democracies Act, which would find, would make Civic engagement, education, the equivalent of STEM education, a priority in education, and would provide a billion dollars from the federal government to launch that program.

[00:18:14] That ought to be a high priority after the 2024 election. 

[00:18:18] Bob Gatty: Now, with your experience as a former alderman in a city with a long history of political corruption, and as a political scientist, how can we create lasting positive change in our communities? 

[00:18:34] Dick Simpson: One of the first things that's happened in Chicago is through lawsuits.

[00:18:40] We have eliminated political patrons. That is, I can't appoint you to a city job just because you worked in my election, and I can't fire you if you gave a campaign contribution to my opponent. That's now the law of the land. It's been up to the Supreme Court several times. Corruption has become in fact, unconstitutional.

[00:19:02] But there is a problem when the Supreme Court has decided the recent cases on corruption, they've narrowed the definition of corruption to a direct quid pro quo. That is, just because you gave me a campaign contribution, it's not corrupt. Only if you gave me a campaign contribution with a promise that I would back Law 2703.

[00:19:27] Is it a corruption act? That's way too narrow to be able to effectively deal by law with corruption. There are other steps we can do. For instance, in Chicago, we have by executive order and now by ordinance, taking away what was known as aldermanic privilege. That's when the city council person got to tell the administrative agent.

[00:19:52] Don't give them a driveway permit. Don't give them an awning. Don't give them bring some building inspectors and close them down. The aldermen were too powerful and then they used that to get bribes from their the businesses mostly in their local community.

[00:20:09] Bob Gatty: You served as an alderman when?

[00:20:13] Dick Simpson: I served for eight years from 1971 to 1979.

[00:20:18] I led the opposition block against Mayor Richard J. Daly and his successor, Mayor Michael Bilandic. 

[00:20:25] Bob Gatty: That must've been an interesting eight years that you spent. 

[00:20:28] Dick Simpson: It was a very interesting eight years. It did give me an insight to politics and real politics that has been invaluable and helpful, I think.

[00:20:39] Bob Gatty: Okay. Now, in her foreword to your book, Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot writes, Democracy is an argument that says that our society's greatest success comes by all of its members having an equal opportunity to unlock their shared talent and potential. Can you comment about that? 

[00:21:02] Dick Simpson: Yes. We've known since Athenian democracy 2, 500 years ago that when you unleash the power of the public, that each individual can aspire to whatever point they want, and each can have a voice in shaping the policies of the government, that there are enormous advances.

[00:21:20] And some of the advances in the United States have happened as we've become more democratic over the years. Originally women couldn't vote originally African Americans couldn't vote, and so with many minorities and others, American Indians certainly. As we've unleashed the power of more and more of our population, we've made greater and greater gains.

[00:21:42] The danger now is we tend to be moving in the other direction. For instance, you mentioned Mr. Trump. If he were to become president, we might well spiral into an autocracy. 

[00:21:54] Bob Gatty: Yes, that is a very scary idea and a very scary likelihood, and it's hard to understand how people can't see that , but I guess that's where we're, where we are.

[00:22:10] Dick Simpson: I have great confidence in the next election, but it only holds true if everyone turns out, and in the long term, even winning the election and making sure that we don't move more autocratically is not enough. We have to redesign our democracy to have more participatory democracy at the local level and more deliberative democracy at the higher levels.

[00:22:35] And that's doable, but it's not doable without the public demanding it. 

[00:22:39] Bob Gatty: Do you have any Stories you'd like to share with us from the time that you were an alderman working under the, or working with the administration of Mayor Daley? 

[00:22:51] Dick Simpson: The biggest clash we had was right after I became alderman in 71 that July.

[00:22:57] The mayor appointed a man named Tom Keene, Jr., put before the council, the appointment of Tom Keene, Jr. to the Zoning Board of Appeals local body. This decides on the zoning for properties. And the problem with that was twofold. One, he was the son of the most powerful member of the City Council, Tom Keene, Sr.

[00:23:20] And secondly, that is it's nepotism, that if your name is Gotti, you can't be, in an important position. If your name is Keene or Daley, you can be. That means most of us are cut out from politics and government. The second problem was it turned out that Tom Keene Jr. was also the vice president of Arthur Rubloff Company, which was the biggest developer and real estate agent in Chicago at the time.

[00:23:46] So it was a conflict of interest in two directions. And I've stood up to oppose it. The mayor daily had the longest tirade that he had in his mayoral career in the city council. And we lost that vote. The vote was 48 to 2. But over time, we've been able to break much of the machine and to establish a better democracy and to elect people like Lori Lightfoot or the current mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson.

[00:24:16] Bob Gatty: Are you still involved politically at all in Chicago? 

[00:24:21] Dick Simpson: I have through the last election and I still support some congressional candidates and others around the country.

[00:24:28] Bob Gatty: Okay, do you have anything else you'd like to add? 

[00:24:32] Dick Simpson: I hope people will begin to take seriously these multiple problems, these cascading crises that we face, but have a sense of hope.

[00:24:43] The reason the book is titled Democracies from the Birth is it is not just doom and gloom. It suggests there is a way forward, and it's one that we can take together. All right. 

[00:24:56] Bob Gatty: That's a hopeful comment. Where can people find your books, Dr. Simpson, and how can they reach out to you if they want to?

[00:25:05] Dick Simpson: So the book was published by the University of Illinois Press, but it's available in an e book form. It's available on Amazon, Barnes Noble, any of the sites that people normally shop for books. Local bookstore can easily order it. And it's a paperback, so it's relatively inexpensive. If people wanna reach me, the best way is by email.

[00:25:27] My email is Simpson at edu. That's U iic, correct? University of Illinois, Chicago. Okay, great. 

[00:25:37] Bob Gatty: Alright, Dr. Simpson, thank you so much. It's been great talking with you and I appreciate you joining us on the Lean to the Left Podcast. 

[00:25:45] Dick Simpson: My pleasure. Hope to see you again soon. Thank you.

[00:25:48] .