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A post-election rally on Elm Street.
Hacker: More rallies needed.
American democracy is sick, in the view of a local democracy doctor. His prescription: more democracy.
And that doesn’t mean just voting.
The democracy doctor is Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. He runs the university’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. A prominent author and opinion writer, Hacker has advised government leaders in the United States and abroad and was an influential voice for a public option in deliberations over crafting national health care policy.
These days he has focused much of his attention on the economic decline of the middle class and the loss of confidence and participation in American democracy (including in his latest book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper). His concerns grew greater in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. He said he is wondering “whether democracy can survive.”
“I don’t think it’s a question I have ever asked before,” Hacker said Wednesday during an interview on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “I turned 46 yesterday — so in my adult life I’ve seen very big scandals. Iran-Contra. The impeachment of President Clinton. And the George W. Bush presidency. But I’ve never questioned whether our democracy could survive.”
He spoke of the growing inability of the political system to tackle the country’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to the new global economy’s impact on American workers. He spoke of voter ID laws that have restricted the ability of many low-income people to cast ballots. He spoke of government “dysfunction,” the evaporation of responsible business-sector civic leadership, and the inability of people to obtain legitimate information awash in a wave of fake and slanted news. (The New York Times’s Eduardo Porter tackled the same questions Wednesday in this incisive column.)
“We really need in this era of more than ever to teach people how to be informed consumers of and users of information. We are awash in information. But much of it — more of it than ever — is suspect,” Hacker argued.
In light of the stated agendas of the incoming Republican Congressional leadership and the Trump administration, Hacker called for citizens to participate in a “broad-based movement” that will “defend and protect certain core individual rights. I see that threat in manyy places, notably in the taking away of fundamental voting rights from significant of the voting public.”
He also called for systemic changes in U.S. government.
“I am not a fan of every state getting two senators,” he said. “I am not a fan of a state that has only two escalators in the whole state — Wyoming — also getting to have two senators. It is a tiny little state with a tiny population. As a result a voter in Wyoming has something like 60 times the influence of a voter in California in the Senate. It doesn’t make any sense.”
While changing the two-senator rule may be a long shot, Hacker said, the country needs in some way to address how the concentration of black and Latino voters in cities ultimately runs up their voting power in those districts, but overall diminishes their national political power. He supports some form of proportional representation or “ranked” voting. (Read about that here.) “The fundamental issue is the system involves enormous amounts of wasted votes,” he said.
And he called for fixing gerrymandered districts that have helped polarize the country and produce gridlock in Washington.
Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full interview with Jacob Hacker on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.” You’ll learn what “autarky” means.