Climate Crisis, Meet Democracy Crisis

Wall Street. And he's also worked in politics for a wide range of folks, including Howard Dean, Corey Bush, and Elizabeth Warren. Today, Berger works with More Perfect Union, an advocacy group that helps working people be seen and heard in media coverage. We spoke back in November twenty twenty one for a wrap up episode of Seen on Radio's Climate season, focused on what needs to be done now to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis.

I'll link to that episode in the show notes. It's well worth a listen. But I also wanted to bring folks this longer conversation because I think it's just so relevant to the task at hand as we start a new year. Hope you enjoy the conversation. It's coming up right after this quick break.

which I'm still very proud of the branding. And it was actually a pretty formative experience for me because I grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts that was pretty evenly split politically and about as normal as could be. And it really helped me, I think, understand how to try to take what could be considered radical ideas and try to make them very approachable in mainstream, which I think I've tried to do and everything that

I've subsequently done. After that, I was actually at an anti war protest and somebody gave me a fly this flyer for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and I thought to myself, Okay, that's a plausible that's a plausible theory of change, that if that guy won, we could actually end the war.

And so I went and I worked for his campaign as an intern in Burlington, And so that kind of set up the two main threads of my career, I guess is sort of social movement stuff more in the streets, and kind of left of the democratic part and trying to bring some of those same values and ideas into mainstream politics. I sometimes joke I've I've worked for every tea Party of the left organization that has ever existed, even like putting like all these deep cuts that like

no one's ever really heard of before. But you know, so I worked for Rebuild the Dream, which was a move On spinoff that was supposed to kind of be the counterweight to the Tea Party that was started by Van Jones. I worked for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is one of the first organizations I claimed to be doing what a lot of the groups on the

right do around elections. And then eventually most I tried to start with myself in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen with a bunch of people who have since gone on to do a lot of really cool and interesting things. And then that group, which was called All of Us, we ended up merging with Justice Democrats. So I was around when Justice Democrats was first kind of getting started, and I had a chance to meet some of the folks there and work with Corey Bush in twenty eighteen, and so, yeah,

it was early to that organization. And then on the social movement side, I could tell this chronologically, but I sort of story is kind of bouncing back and forth between these two kind of bodies of work.

When Occupy Wall Street broke out, and I was living in New York at the time, and I went down the first week and I remember thinking myself, Okay, like here these guys did it. I'm just gonna jump on this thing. So I threw down pretty hard with Occupy, and I think I was one of the first kind of NGO connected folks who had been working in politics.

So I ended up helping, I think, bring some of those types into the movement and planning some of the big mobilizations that we did, the big days of mobilization, and after Occupy, you know, my mind was kind of blown because I very clearly saw both how this random ragtag group of folks had started this global movement that was so bigger and more powerful than anything that the NGOs that I had worked for had ever been able

to come up. But also, as anybody who was part of Occupy Wall Street could tell you, it was an absolute shit show, disaster shambles in its own right. And so I spent some time thinking about what it would take to create a social movement that had more structure and strategy and had a chance to actually win the

things that I was fighting for. And through some of the things I was exploring at the time, I ended up getting connected with Carlos Savadra and Paul and who were students of Yvonne Maravich, who was one of the lead organizers of the Serbian Revolution that overthrew Slovanan Loosovich and Paul and carlos are you know, Americans who had a lot of movement experience and were studying Yvon's ideas about movement building, and I sort of agitated them, and

together the three of us ended up starting with a lot of other folks an organization called the Momentum Training Organization that has a theory of organizing or or teach us some practices around organizing that help folks think through how to have more structure and strategy so that you can have highly autonomous movement where people can operate without central command or organization, while at the same time having clarity around what the goals are and how to achieve

those things. Together and the Momentum Organization ended up training

a lot of people. After we started Momentum, the Warren Gaza broke out, so I kind of took the ideas that we had been starting to cook in Momentum and applied that to the sort of nascent Jewish left, where I helped start If Not Now, which is a Jewish American movement against the occupation in Palestine and learned a lot about how different it is to apply a theory than it is to come up with one, But very proud of the young people who created that, who really

led that movement. And then I think when we were doing all of us, I wish I referred to previously. It's a very small group of people at that time who were taking this momentum stuff seriously. A lot of the people who I was personally most invested in were these kids who ran the Divestment Student Network, which you know, I thought was the coolest climate organizing happening at the time. And I remember Varsh came to me in twenty sixteen,

twenty seventeen. I was like, hey, we want to do we want to front load, we want to plan a movement coming out of DSN. And we were hoping that like the folks from if Not Now could train us and how to do that really absolutely, like let us know what we can do, do anything to help you guys.

And that movement became Sunrise. And so I feel I sometimes joke, like with the Sunrise kids that I'm like the uncle that's like prouder of the movement than like even the parents or like the kids themselves like, no, I will not hear you talk badly about yourself. Okay, I don't want to hear. I worked on the Warren campaign in twenty twenty doing progressive outreach, and after that I helped start with Fazshakir, who is the campaign manager

for Bernie's campaign. I helped start an organization called More Perfect Union, which is a media advocacy organization that builds power for working people. And that's why I work now as the editorial director.

went viral without a plan to operate at scale. And so what ends up happening, in my experience is those kinds of decohere very rapidly because there's not really especially when you're talking about the actual institution of the movement, there's very little holding it together because it wasn't really planning to get as big as it got. And so basically front loading is just a process by which you spend time thinking about what do we do if this

gets huge? Right, And so as people are entering into the movement, you can arm them with the knowledge and the frameworks that they need to operate as part of it, even if it gets really big. And I think that's something that has served Sunrise really well in that they had a pretty not that you don't have to answer a million different questions, and it's not like this just kind of like unfolding protein that just then, you know,

collapses into the shape that it needs to be. But it certainly allows you to It guides your decision making once the movement is unfolding in a way that I think it can be really helpful both for leaders and for even new people coming in the front door to understand, Okay, if I sign up for the movement, this is what I'm signing up for. This is why they believe what they believe, this is what we're fighting for, This is

how we're going to fight for it. And so it allows you to then take leadership in your local community and be make decisions that make sense for your local context while still being part of something much much larger and more coherent.

different areas of the movement. But you know, the folks who help come up with these ideas spend a lot of time studying different organizational structures, reading about Honestly, one of the biggest inspirations is the Evangelical Church and the way that they can create these kind of small groups that really foster leadership and create tiers of engagement for people to move up that give people a ton of agency and autonomy, but within a structure so that as

you're going about your journey that you are you're part of something bigger and it's kind of laid out. So the goal is not necessarily to completely do away with hierarchies. It's not a kind of anarchist like flattening of all difference, but to allow for the hierarchies to emerge in ways that serve the movement and that allow people still to have a lot of choice and freedom in kind of like how they want to participate in what that means.

And I think especially that helps create a culture in which there's a lot of accountability and the people at the top are understanding their role as kind of servant leaders in fostering fostering a movement that people actually want to be a part of and that feels good to

be a part of. And I think that's one of Sunrise as many great successes, is in taking the culture aspect of that really seriously and wanting to invite people in and to make it feel friendly, and the Left, I think doesn't always do that, and I think, more importantly, doesn't even really try a lot of the time. And

I think Sunrise has. The folks who helped start it have been a part of the left enough to know that that doesn't work, right, Like, if you don't create a welcoming space for people that folks actually want to be a part of, then they'll go home, because there's a million other things that they could do, and this stuff is really hard. I think that they took that seriously in a way that a very few other groups do and have, and I think it's a significant part of their success.

as is for the broader momentum community. And I would not claim I'd say in the same way that like eighteen months out, Sunrise was kind of like, Yeah, we like want to start a new movement that's not just about ending the fossil fuel industry, but that has a sort of positive vision of what we're trying to fight for, and we want to frontload it, and we want it to be big, and we want it to be political and not just a social movement, but we don't really know what it is yet. That I'm sort of in

that kind of a place with this conversation. So with that caveat that I'm still early in trying to figure out how to talk about and think about this stuff, I would say I think, well, first, let's like define the problem, right, because I think my intuition, hypothesis sense of where this is going is that essentially it's not really so much a question of should we keep the current system that we have, or should we throw it

aside and get a totally new system. Unfortunately, I think this decision has some already been made for us, and that I don't think that this current system will can sustain itself through the course of the decade. Because what's fundamentally happening here is the United States is a country we like to think of ourselves and historically have you know, really been very different from a lot of other countries

and sort of the pre eminent whatever American exceptionalism. But if you just were to step back and look at the US as a country, it would be very clear the current constitutional arrangement is not long for this world. You have a significant subset of the population, particularly the white population, although not only that, is really terrified about the transition away from a white majority population to a multi racial majority. And that's happening in the context of

world historic inequality. Right, So, you really do have the conditions for ethno nationalist authoritarian politics right like call it fascists call it ethno nationalist authoritarian white supremacist politics, in which there is a significant number of people that are willing to use violence and do not really subscribe to the beliefs that are required of participating in a democracy because they're afraid of losing power within that democracy to

other ethnic groups. That's the kind of beginning of my

analysis here. And if you take that as a kind of skeleton key for what's going on, you're a lot becomes more clear in that that group of people, that kind of white supremacist plurality, is not big enough to govern the country, but it is big enough to take over the Republican part as Trump showed, and through their control of the Republican Party, are able to take control of state and federal governments because we have a very anti democratic political system, because our political system is the

result of a compromise with slaveholders and so vastly over represents small rural states that white people have more power, and so that white supremacist plurality can take over the federal government, state governments with a minority of votes, and because of other aspects of our anti democratic political system, the Senate, as we're seeing now, the electoral college, as we are kind of threatened with every four years that there's going to be another instance in which the winner

of the popular vote does not become president that has happened recently in a number of times, and the two party system which allows for that, let's say, twenty five to forty percent of the population to govern, we are not We're not going to see the multi racial majority have an opportunity to turn its will into law in the next ten to fifteen years. And I think the amount of tension that that will generate will break the

political system. I don't think that. I don't think that the amount of friction that will be created in the in the in the popular will of being steymied in that way, particularly when the people in power are taking active steps to move us away from competitive elections and limit people's rights, I cannot imagine a situation in which the multiracial majority takes that lying down. And I also don't think that the white nationalist plurality is going to

become less vociferous in their opposition to multiracial democracy. So, and if you were to talk about this with a comparative political scientist, they would tell you, if you have this kind of demographic transition happening, the worst case scenario, our political system is basically designed as poorly as possible to manage that kind of a demographic transition because the two party system collapses all divisions in society into a

zero sum, all or nothing competitive existential conflict, and when that gets racialized or ethnicized, it can become dangerous very quickly. We're as polarized as any time since before the Civil War, and in addition, with the separately elected presidency and a bi cameral system, we have what a political scientists referred to as a profusion of veto points right. So it's very, very difficult for bills to become law, as we see

with anything. But the example I always use is gun control, and after name a massacre, people always ask, if this stuff is eighty five percent approval rating, why can't it pass? And the truth of the matter is that very little can pass, very little, very few laws make it through the our system. And there's a stat that I think

is not bode well. I tweeted this the other day and people thought I was saying not in jest, but you know, there's there's a stat that the United States is the only system that has a separately elected executive branch that is not at some point collapsed into dictators because in presidential systems, systems with a separate, separately elected executive.

What happens is there's a conflict between the president and the Congress and there's some external crisis that requires action, and the Congress is incapable of or unwilling to respond, and then the executive takes the authority to do so without the approval of the legislature. And once that is broken, it's very hard to take back. And I think some version of that is more or less inevitable in the next five years.

organize a political revolution before? But it's not so neat and tidy as that, right, Like I it's there's probably a little bit more overlap in those scenarios than I'm given credit for.

will come in and change it back. I think people are yeah, I just.

it there. But you know where I think it needs to go is we cannot simply make this about defending the existing constitutional order, because it's precisely the existing constitutional order that was failing that led us to this point. Trump is not aberrant in that respect. He is. Actually there's a way in which you could argue he is. He is a defender of the underlying structures of the

constitution right they serve him. So despite his willingness to get rid of the parts of the constitution that don't benefit him, he doesn't want to change the underlying political arrangements because they're good for Republicans. So I and like you said, I mean, like in most other countries, the way that democracy works, the way it's supposed to work, is you vote for a new government. The government passes the laws based on what they said they were going

to do in the election. Then voters get to decide did that work for us? And depending on whether it did or it didn't, they get rid of the people in power, or they give them more opportunities to do other things that they promise that they're going to do. In our system, none of it works like that. People, when you elect a new government, no matter what they ran on. They probably can't actually do the thing that

they said that they were going to do. And it's not because they weren't super committed to it or that they don't really believe in it or whatever. It's because literally our institutions make it impossible for them to do that. And then people get mad because stuff isn't happening, because things are going bad, and our system makes it damn near impossible to figure out whose fault that is right, whose fault is it that build back better got watered down?

I mean, I follow this stuff super closely, about as closely as anybody could, and I get confused sometimes. I can't imagine how working class people who don't follow politics that closely and just want to understand what our politics to do more to help people like them, why they don't. They can't tell who's that fault for these things, who they should be angry at, who they should reelect. It doesn't make any sense. So the accountability mechanism is completely broken.

And to your point about wanting Biden to take more, to just do more, this is the trajectory of the past forty years. Is the Congress is less and less able to pass laws, and so what that means of the presidency is it has to just do more, do more through executive action, do more through what existing authorities it already has. And some people talk about that in terms of the imperial presidency, and it is. It is, It is dangerous, and it is part of it is

one of the many threads leading us towards authoritarianism. But it needs to be seen as a result of the failure of Congress to govern. And Congress's failure is again not simply the result of kind of people with bad ideas or insufficient will, but the result of a political system that is this Rube Goldberg device that simply can't sustain itself. And I think it's really important here also to give some credence to the founders while also recognizing

just what the hell we're talking about here. Like these guys were, it was the first modern republican democracy in the world. They had no examples to draw from, and they had a lot of beliefs that now we would think of as aberrant, and they didn't have anything to

compare themselves to. And so I think there's a way that we can come down on the Constitution and the kind of original political institutions of the country in a way that both recognizes that there were real innovations and real leaps forward for human liberation, while not ignoring the reality that many of these people were slave holders, and that, in a very practical sense, that the institutions that they created were the result of compromises with the power of slaveholders,

and that those compromises still live with us today. That we can kind of not throw out the baby with the bathwater, like constitutional democracy is still worth fighting for, and many of the ideals that we consider to be, you know, American ideals are worth fighting for. But I would argue that the spirit of the founders would augur in favor of us creating a new constitution today in the same way that they did and not paying fealty to the work of long dead men who don't understand

the world that we live in today. So I think we can talk more about this some other time. But I think that trying to imagine what it would look like to create a new constitution is not as impossible as people think. Again, because the United States is a country, and other countries have constitutions that are significantly better than the United States.

You'd be like, well, this house is pretty nice, but holy shit, it's always flooding and leaking and maybe it's just time for a new plumbing system.

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