Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu Season three, Formula six. How prohibitions war on alcohol went so off the rails the government wound up poisoning its own people. This is a bonus episode, and as you may recall, I like to bring in guests for these bonus episodes and try to learn something a little bit new or different about the subject. So we know prohibition was obviously a colossal government snafo and a fascinating story in its own right. But what are the nitty gritty lessons or
insights we can walk away with this season? I wanted to talk to someone who could help us zoom out, someone who thinks deeply about how power, corruption, and unintended consequences shape our world.
So I called up.
Josh Graham Linn, the co founder of represent Us, an organization dedicated to fighting political corruption and making our democracy work better unlike say, a democracy that poisons its own citizens. Josh helped us dig into big questions that inform our understanding not only a Formula six but also it's lingering echoes into the present. How do we break free of political influence and lobbyists? How do we bring power back to voters and ultimately, how do we strengthen democracy for
future generations. Turns out the tangled mess of bad decisions behind prohibition isn't just a history lesson, it's a warning. So here it is my fascinating conversation with Josh Graham Lin. Hello, Josh Graham LN.
Hello Ed Heckenweiler helms close.
Well, Hey, so I'm so excited to have you on our SNAPO podcast, and I'm just going to throw a couple of disclaimer slash context bits out there.
First.
The first disclaimer is that I know you very well and I don't like you at all. No, that's not true. We're very good friends. You are a very good friend of mine, and the reason we know each other well is because you run an organization called represent Us, and I have been very active with that organization because I really believe in its mission. So with that out of the way, tell us a little bit about represent Us and your involvement, how it got started and how you got roped in.
Well, what a nice introduction.
I thought it was going to be some scary disclaimer, but the fact that we're friends and buddies I think makes it all the better. Right, So, represent us is pretty straightforward. The idea here is that the American government should work an answer, to work for an answer to the American people out ages. It's just it's a foreign.
Thought, right.
Because of the influence of big money and special interests and the two political parties that we have in their grip on the system, the American government does not work for the American people. And so represent us is all about building a movement of folks from across the political spectrum to make the government work for we the people. And we do that by going city by city, state by state across the country, passing laws that actually make the government answer to the people.
Right on, right on.
Yeah, every time I hear that, I just get all excited about Reporence.
I never get tired of saying it.
It's one of those it's like saying to somebody like hey, do you want free candy, or like yeah, It's like everybody likes it.
And I think there is just a very pervasive sense in America right now that things are feeling a little broken. No matter what side you're on, if your team won or your team loss, there's still this sense that like, well, still a lot of people are feeling kind of screwed and unheard. And that's really what represent us is trying to fix. How did it get started? What's kind of the origin story.
Yeah, so it's interesting to hear you say people feel like the government isn't working for them.
That's we know, that's true. Lots of people feel that way.
I think what a lot of people don't know is that scientific studies, one after the other.
After the other, prove that to be true.
So in the aftermath of Citizens United, which was in twenty twelve, and for those who don't know, Citizens United is a Supreme Court ruling that essentially said that special interests, corporations, private entities can spend almost unlimited amounts of money to make political contributions aka by politicians and elections.
And this is because political donations are considered a form of speech under free speech.
And I don't want to make everybody go to sleep, But like, there's other Supreme Court rulings like Speech Now that had to do with all this. But the short version is we call it Citizens United a bunch of
rulings that stick together. And in the wake of that ruling, it was very clear that the influence of money in politics was going to get out of control quickly, and as a result of that, we thought, well, if the system is captured by big money, we the people are probably going to lose faith in our institutions and the whole thing may start to crumble. And that was back in twenty twelve, and I would say that a lot of the fears that we had have started to ring
true where political spending has gotten out of control. This was once again the most expensive election we've ever seen, and the one thing that hasn't changed in all those twelve years is that big money still has a death grip on the system and we the people are paying the price for it.
So why are we talking to you in the context of season three of Snaffoo, which is all about early twentieth century Prohibition. Well, it's one of the first big sort of conflagrations of values in twentieth century America. Of course, culture wars go back centuries, and before we go further, I kind of want to I think it'd be cool to actually read a definition of culture war, because Wikipedia
some up quite nicely. So a culture war is a form of cultural conflict, a metaphorical war between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology, moral beliefs, humane virtues, religious practices, etc. Upon mainstream society or upon
the other. In political usage, the term culture war is a metaphor for hot button politics about values and ideologies realized with intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters of public policy and of consumption. So one of the really interesting things about culture wars and prohibition is a perfect example of this is how laws get passed with very
little actual support from the general public. So in the early twentieth century we had organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Anti Saloon League, and they made a lot of noise, and they also preyed upon a lot of broader cultural fears, associating alcohol and drunkenness with immigrants and big cities and crime. Temperance, on the other hand, was portrayed as an expression of the sort of pure and lily white, lovely, small town, old fashioned American values.
But even so, broadly speaking, the general population did not support a national ban on alcohol at all, and yet it passed. So this is where I'm getting back to where you were starting to jump to in the beginning. You often talk about a famous Princeton study that demonstrates this phenomenon. Tell us about that study and some of its real world implications in contemporary policy.
Yeah. So it's just fascinating to me as we sit here and talk about this, that prohibition has become such a pivotal moment in the American story, the American history. Like, I love that you're doing a whole season on this. So the Princeton University study that you're referencing, without being able to show the graphics for it, it might be a little hard to visualize. But the upshot is that
the folks at Princeton, they worked with Northeastern. They found that the American people, average American income earners, amongst American people, appear to have a minuscule, near zero, statistically non significant impact upon public policy. I will summarize that again. The American people heard that zero impact on public policy.
It's literally the opposite of what we all think and it's and it's the opposite of how we think our government was structured to work.
Yeah, right, it's nuts.
So the way they figured this out is They looked at public opinion polls over a twenty year period, so there's a longitudinal study of twenty years of looking at public opinion polls. And they compared those public opinion polls to the laws that Congress did or didn't pass. And again, the upshot of that is that for the average American
income earner, there's zero impact at all. Now, when they looked at the same data for folks who can afford lobbyists and those and sort of the higher echelons the control government, they found that there wasn't a direct correlation. But if those special interest groups didn't like something, they had almost a total ability to block it.
So if they didn't want it wouldn't happen.
What are some contemporary policy examples of this of how this is taking effect?
Yea, I think there's a lot, actually, and some of them are very, you know, very It's arguably every policy.
Really, I mean, it really is.
So we'll start with the easy ones, right, like economic policy. Like most Americans when they think about how economic distribution should happen, it's actually nowhere near what economic distribution really looks like. Our inequality in this country is a thousand fold worse than most people think.
So that's kind of an.
Easy issue for us all to agree on. And then there's the harder ones like guns and abortion. Sure, and the truth is most of the American people want common sense solutions that are best for the most of us on these issues, and instead what we get are, as you said, ideological hot button divisive rhetoric and then divisive policy getting passed. And part of the reason for that is that it's actually better for those in power to
have arguments about policy. It helps them fundraise in their elections, It actually helps drive the political industrial complex forward.
And it is so interesting that so much of what we hear surrounding these issues is triggering, right, And that's intentional. It's just trying to get emotional responses out of us because that clouds our judgment. And also that, like creating more polarization and adversarial dispositions among the general population, makes it easier to control the general population.
I think there is a truth that for many on some of these issues, it's not just the rhetoric, right, like that when we talk about guns in abortion, there's a real world implication there. And so I don't want to minimize like it's not just about the rhetoric, right, It's not just that we are talking about it in an inflammatory way. It actually has a very real impact
on people's lives. I think, where when we're talking about the government working on behalf of the people, it's the fact that the laws that get passed and the way that government operates is actually wildly out of step with what most of us would consider reasonable or common sense.
And we never have that conversation, like because that's the conversation that gets lost in the nuance, because it doesn't get people fired up, it's not hot button, it doesn't fuel the culture war, right, And so I think both of those things can be true, Like, on one hand, this has real world implications on a lot of people's lives, and on the other hand, we could get a lot better at talking about it through a political lens without
getting so fired up about the personal impact. It's like, the ability to hold both of those things could get us much better outcomes if only our government were designed to do so.
And it's just not.
Okay.
So we've established that public policy as it is generated by Congress has a statistically non existent connection to the desires of the public. Why what are the primary. What are sort of the underpinning reasons for that?
Yeah, I mean the simplest answer is follow the money. Right, Running for office costs a lot of money, and so in order to win office, you have to have a big pot of money to spend. And where do you go get that money? Well, you can fundraise from lots of five dollars donations, which some people do, or you can go to special interests and the people who have lots of money and ask for big chunks at a time.
And that's actually a lot more efficient, right that you can raise a lot more money a lot more quickly if you get it in big chunks. And I think everybody kind of knows that part of it. But part of what people don't know is that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party also do a ton of fundraising that they then spend on elections. And when you're in Congress, let's say you want to move a bill forward. You have a great idea, you want to move it forward.
In order to move that bill forward, you have to be on a committee that works on that kind of thing. So in order to get on a committee, you actually have to fundraise for your political party. That's how committee appointments end up working. But if you really want to move something forward, if you want to have control over whether or not the committee moves your wonderful idea to the floor of Congress, you have to be the committee chair.
And so in order to be the committee chair, you might have to fundraise another two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on top of what you've already fundraised to get into office, to get into the committee. That is not like a maybe thing. That's actually how committee appointments work. There are fundraising goals that are put in place. The New York Times recently did this incredible exit interview with a whole bunch of people leaving Congress, and they just
talked about this. They were like, that's how it works. It's business as usual, and it's so corrupt. Right, it's corrupt and legal. Right, it's corrupt and baked into the system that we have. By some accounts, members of Congress when they get into office have to spend up to seventy percent of their time fundraising for reelection. And I don't want to paint a picture that these are bad people.
It's just that's the reality of the system. So it could be ed Helm's runs for Congress and contrary to popular belief, is a really good guy who wants to do really good things.
And yet you.
Can't do good things because you have to spend your time fundraising if you want to do those good things. And so it's a trap. And like all systems, this one exists to protect itself.
And it feels like it's such a cliche to say, like it's the system.
We're going to put the system on trial, but that kind of is the deal, Like that's exactly.
What we're dealing with.
It's with our political system right now.
It's totally the deal.
And you know, unfortunately, most of us don't think that it's our job to change that system.
It is. It's up to us, you and me, Josh.
That has to be Yeah, most of the two of us that are here do think it's our job to change that system.
There are a lot of reasons that we feel polarized as a country right now, and you know, we can point to the obvious wedge issues. We can point to the information silos, the social media and all of these things, and those are very real. And there, you know, are cable news, which is very corporate and cynical, and these are very real factors, but there are also a number of structural factors that are wedging us, things built into
the political system, engineered to polarize us even further. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about those more structural issues.
Yeah. Sure. I think very often.
It's so easy to point to the media environment, and of course we should, because it's a huge part of the problem, but it's not the whole problem, and it is getting to this other piece that we don't think of. You just started talking about it our primary system or jerrymandering, So we'll start with jerrymandering. I think most people know the word jerrymandering at this point, and they understand that it's bad because it cuts people out of elections that
they should otherwise be able to vote in. And the problem with jerrymandering is that in some eighty seven percent of racists for the US House, we already know which party is going to win the election before it even starts, because the districts have been drawn to protect the party that's already in power. And the reason that that happens is that when you're part of wins elections, you get to be the one to redraw the district for the
next election. It would be like a Super Bowl winning football team getting to set all of the rules for the coming season to favor themselves. This is politics, not a game. But like, you can see how it happens if instead of having politicians draw district lines, you gave the power to let's say, voters from across the political spectrum.
I'm using a number that is real. Here in the state of Michigan and also in Washington, they use nine Democrats, nine Republicans, and nine independents overseen by judges following rules to draw their new maps, and as a result, they draw districts that are much more competitive, much more fair, much more reflective of the population.
You said, much more competitive. What are the numbers on how jerry mandering has affected the competitiveness of congressional elections.
Yeah, so this year the number might have been eighty three percent, but it's always between eighty three and eighty seven percent of congressional elections have no competition at all. And that's kind of an abstract concept, right, Like, what does that even mean? No competition? And it's in the primaries we get to vote for. Like, if you're a Democrat, you vote for Democrats. If you're a Republican, you vote for Republicans. I'll come back to that in a second.
If you have a Gerrymander district where you know the Democrat is going to win, then all the only thing that matters is that primary. And then by the time you get to the general election, yes, sure there's a Democrat and a Republican voting, but the districts have been cut up in such a way that only the Democrat can win in that district. And of course the same thing happens on the other side too. I'm just ticking on Democrats here, So let's just talk about primaries for one second.
Well, I I just want to put an exclamation point on that because it still blows my mind. Over eighty percent of congressional elections are non competitive, right, And what that means fundamentally is that they aren't really elections, Like they're not they're just kind of a rubber stamping ritual, a process, a kind of like a quaint nod to the past, but it isn't it's not an actual election.
Well, and the result of that is that we as the people don't actually have the power to hold politicians accountable because there's no threat for them. They get into power and they know they're going to be able to keep their power. Even though it feels like we might be able to vote them out.
We're actually can dance. We were doing the song and dance of putting a Republican and a Democrat against each other. But eighty percent of districts one will always win.
Yep.
And so you asked before about like the divisiveness of this, What ends up happening is that because there's no competition in the general election, the primary election is actually where we choose the candidate who's ultimately going to go on to win. And in the primaries you only have Republicans running against Republicans and Democrats running against Democrats. And we've all heard the term like so and so got primaried
and so they lost. And that's because in the primaries there's a much narrower group of voters who are voting, and so the party tends to be more extreme with their rhetoric, tends to elect more extreme candidates because you've got such a narrow amount of voters making their voices heard,
and just to put that in numbers. What ends up happening is that five to eight percent of total voters in any given place end up choosing the candidate who's going to ultimately win, which is again it's like, it's crazy to think about five to eight percent of voters choosing the candidate who then breezes through the general election and wins.
And we know that generally the voters that participate in primaries are the most sort of extreme voters of that group. Yeah, it's the party base, right, We've all heard that term a thousand times, Right, they've got to play to their base voters. Those are the base voters ones that show up. And this is why we see so many politicians emerge that everyone's kind of shaking their heads, like how did this guy get nominated? How did this how did this
lady get there? Like that seems crazy. Well, it's because like the most hardcore, fervent partisans are the ones nominating those people.
So you brought up before this sort of question about the media environment. Yeah, and I I still think it can be hard to visualize really, like why is it that this structural or systemic problem.
That we were just talking about leads to.
The extremism because it's still right, like, can't the media just shut that down? Can't we just like, isn't it all a social media problem? And so just a thought experiment, like, imagine if the majority of Congress and the Senate and the Presidency were filled with people that had won in really competitive elections where they had to answer to a majority of voters across the country. They would be talking to Democrats and Republicans and independent because in order to
get beyond fifty percent a majority, you have to do that. Now, you put any random congress person on the news, and instead of saying crazy stuff about the other side, you've got someone in there who is actually a rational, thoughtful I don't even wanted to use the term moderate, because it's not about moderating the politics. It's just about being representative of the people who are supposed to put you there.
And so you would be putting people into the media who have enormous megaphones, who really do define our culture, like our politicians tell us how to be very often. And so the power of changing the system way upstream primaries jerrymandering is that you elect people who then become spokespeople for our culture. And reflect back to us something that's much more positive, much more nuanced, and much more thoughtful. And I think that gets lost in this conversation.
Somehow You're saying that more level headed people will reach higher levels of government, and they will be the mouthpieces that we see on the media, and that more measured kind of dialogue will have a cultural impact on all of us.
Absolutely.
Yeah, And I'll just add one thing to it, which is, like we already established in our conversation about primaries and gerrymandering, that end it with money in politics, like the incentive if you're running for office, you are incentivized to be more radical because that's how you win. You are incentivized to be a better fundraiser.
Because that's how you win.
If you change those structures so that you are incentivized to be more responsive to the people, less of an egomaniac, more more interested in representing a diverse coalition of voters, if that's the incentive that actually helps you win office, then you will likely elect people who fit that description.
How do you change those incentives?
It's really easy. I can't believe we haven't done it already. So it comes down to policy.
I like to just boil it down to the simplest language that I know, which is like, you just have to change the rules of the system that we're in. So we talked about the rules, rules like who gets to draw district maps? In order to fix jerrymander and you give the power to voters instead of politicians. Now you have voters drawing maps that are more representative. And this already happens across the country in a few states, and they do work better.
And when you say voters, commission of jury duty.
Right, So you know jury duty, you get called in and you said, on a jury This is similar in that you join a commission that is responsible for drawing those district maps, right.
And that's one of those things like.
That is such a no brainer, right, And yet we're in this feedback loop where the people that are making those rules are the people that benefit from the existence of jerrymandering, So they and so so, So what then becomes the way that citizens can make those changes or force our representatives in government to make those changes.
Yeah, So the ballot initiative process is actually one of our best tools. It's not the only tool, but it's certainly one of our best and so in some states, citizens can get together and propose a initiative to put on their ballot to be voted on, and that just that requires collecting a bunch of signatures. It usually requires fundraising to do so. And you know, lawyers and political strategists, it's it's work, but it's totally doable, and it can be led by thoughtful, committed citizens.
It really can.
And then you know, you run a political campaign, you win your valid initiative, and you have changed the law in your state.
Yeah, and I think I don't.
I think a lot of people don't realize like how much power citizens can have in that way, that what ballot initiatives can do, and that they're really they are really just initiatives from the citizenry. They're not it's not a that doesn't have it's not a political process. It's something that goes citizens initiate and it goes before voters. And so things like jerry mandering, which no politician is incentivized.
Some might have the sort of moral backbone to back it up, but they're not incentivized to fix jerry mandering because they're all benefiting from it. So yeah, so it's it is it is up to us and represent us. As seen a lot of success with ballot initiatives, Yeah, we.
Absolutely have, and I don't want to understate the necessity to also put pressure on politicians at the state level. Yes, so bad initiatives give us the chance to do direct democracy, but America is a republic, not a direct democracy, and so very often we need to elect people into power
and then hold them accountable and responsible. And so one of the things that we've started to see is that the more our movement builds power, the more that we were able to actually use that power to tell politicians, if you don't start fixing things, we're going to vote you out.
Now.
Of course that's not going to.
Work in Congress yet, that's a ways off, but in cities and in states, it is the next frontier of how we create change.
Mm hmm, yeah. What are some others?
Oh, the most exciting one of all has got to be ranked choice voting.
There you go.
Everybody tells me that everybody gets pumped when we say ranked choice voting. I know it sounds so boring, but I gotta say. I was at a gathering of some people a couple of days ago, and somebody in the corner of the room was like, you know, the problem is that ranked choice voting is so confusing and it's really hard to explain to people. And somebody across the room was about to speak up and.
Say, like, are you kidding me?
You're just ranking things like what's your favorite, what's your second favorite, what's your third.
It's not that hard.
But instead of that, this guy from Australia was like, excuse me, I could just speak up for a moment.
We've only ever used ranked choice voting.
It's what we always do and every single one of our elections is run that way, and it just like it just makes sense, and like, how could you possibly think it's confusing, You're just it was fantastic to actually have.
Somebody from a country.
And then there was somebody from Ireland who said, yeah, you know, we've been using it forever as well, and it's just a better system than what you guys use here in the US.
Yeah, so I will is that right.
Australia has used ranked choice voting in all of their major political.
That's just how they do it. Yeah, I didn't realize that.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it's like eight.
Countries around the world that use that mostly use ranked choice voting. There's cities across the US that use it in a handful of states as well.
Now, so it's really interesting the amount of misinformation and disinformation that's out there about ranked choice voting because a lot of entrenched power on both sides of the political spectrum realize that it's a shakeup for them.
Yeah, so of course the people that are saying it's terrible are the ones that have the most to lose, so the established party interests. The reason it's amazing is that in our current system, you very rarely see folks winning with more than fifty percent of the vote, especially if there's a third party running for election or in a primary that you know multiple people winning. You can if there's four let's say there's four candidates running in a primary, you can win with twenty six percent of
the vote. You just need your little portion plus one, right, which is kind of bonkers, it's nuts, right, it's really. Yeah, so like twenty six percent of the vote, So it sounds reasonable like shouldn't the person with the most votes win? Yes, of course they should, which is really different than shouldn't somebody who got support from a majority of the public win.
And what's so important about when you use ranked choice voting is that you actually require a candidate to have more than fifty percent support amongst their constituents in order to win. Makes sense, you need more than fifty percent support, And so that's the most important thing here, And I want to just harp on it for a second, like, instead of if it was you and me and two other people running for office, I would only need to
find my twenty six percent in order to win. And that might just be like only the you know, only the dog lovers, or only the crazies, or like whatever you want to say, only the people who think that the roads should all be painted blue. Right, that's my twenty six percent. But if I have to get more than fifty percent to win, then I have to speak
to a majority of the electorate. And to put that in real terms, progressives are usually about twenty five percent of the electorate, Conservatives are somewhere around thirty and the rest are anywhere in the middle. And so you can't win with either just conservatives or just progressives. You have to start broadening your base. So when we talk about incentives, if I have an incentive to reach a bigger.
Base to win office.
I'm going to have to do that, and then once I get into office, I have to answer to those people ranks voting.
Me, and you're so your incentive is to temper your message and not cater to the extremes totally. I mean, how much more chill would our world be?
Right?
And how much elected officials felt a need to speak to a larger audience.
And not only speak to them, but then be accountable to that audience once they get into office, because because then you're kicking them out. But I do want to answer the quest. I know people are going to be listening and thinking like, yeah, but you haven't said how it works or what it is. It's really simple. You choose your first candidate that you think is the best, and then you rank the other ones in order. So number one, Ed, number two, Josh, number three, Jane Doe,
et cetera. It's it's literally, that's the whole entire thing. You just rank your candidates in order rather than choosing one, and then as the votes are calculated, they're able to figure out who has a majority support.
Another term for ranked choice voting is instant runoff, right is that a phrase that that kind of I think I like that phrase because it helps me understand that it's sort of a Then the vote counting is a is a sort of multi step process. Yeah, can you walk us through that a little bit.
Yeah, The application of that is really simple. If let's say there were four people running for office, and let's say I'm gonna use you as an example. Again, let's say Ed gets fifty one percent of the vote. Like the first choice votes, the election is over. Ed has won because you got more than fifty percent of the vote. But let's say you only got forty nine percent, and then there's three of us who are splitting up all
the rest of that other fifty one percent. If that were the case, the vote tabulators would then look at everyone's second choice votes and apply those until somebody reaches more than fifty one percent. And since you were already at forty nine, it's very likely that people who voted for me number one may be voted for you second, and so you got my votes and you won. Sometimes what happens, though, is that instead of somebody getting fifty
it's really spread out. It's twenty six, twenty four, twenty five, twenty five, and so those second choice votes actually can move. It can make it kind of like a horse race, or someone's ahead and then someone else gets ahead. But it's just the same as the runoff elections that they currently use in Georgia, where if nobody gets more than fifty percent, you have a second election.
Right, but you've already cast your votes for your second election, so you don't need to come back to the polls. Right.
You say, the ranking is your sort of second round of Yeah, exactly, of the votes. It is so elegant, it's so simple, and it's so intrinsically fair.
No wonder we don't use it.
Yeah, no wonder we don't use it. Exactly.
There's another really interesting bit of represent A strategy that has echoes in prohibition. The volt said Act Prohibition was overturned.
In sort of a.
Movement that grew state by state, And it turns out this is part of a larger trend of laws that have passed in this same kind of incremental way. Tell us about how that factors into represent us strategy.
Yeah, it's actually a core piece of our strategy is to follow in the footsteps of the prohibitionists, the anti prohibitionists, and learn that throughout American history, passing state laws is ultimately what often leads to a federal victory. And it's not just prohibition. We've seen the same thing with interracial marriage, which took two hundred years of effort, about sixty four losses before they finally got their first victory. Sixty four years of losses, I should say before they got their
first victory. But those of us alive today might be more familiar with the legalization of same sex marriage, which actually only took about twelve years from its first victory
to becoming a federal policy. And so what we see is if we're going to change the government, if you're going to change some big societal issue, the path that has been used very often in the US is to win law in the states as you build a movement, as you shift the culture around those laws, so city by city, state by state, we fix things and then
move on to making it federal. But I think what's interesting about this as pertains to the states is you might think, well, if we're winning in the states, we're not fixing the federal government. But constitutionally, the US states have control over the federal elections. That's just how it works here in the US. It's how a republic was designed.
And so when you change a state law, you're not only building momentum for that federal change, but you actually have the power in many states to directly affect that federal election in your state.
And it doesn't take as much momentum as people might think, right.
Right, it's those first few victories are often really challenging. Marriage equality lost thirty one times before they got their first state victory.
Now you man, that's one of them too, right, Weed's killing it?
Come on, But yeah, it's like once you get to a certain number, and there's no magic number. But what we've seen happen is that those first few victories are slow and they're few and far between. But then eventually you get your second, third, fourth, fifth victory and they start to pile one.
These are you're saying, victories, meaning like states building, states changing laws like one, two, three, four, five, six, states starting to change these.
Laws, right, And then historically what has happened is that, again there's no magic number, but once you get up to maybe the six, ten, twelve number, there tends to be a real acceleration in states passing that same law, right, right, And so we think of it as a tipping point where you get to a certain number of states and then this acceleration happens where many many more states get on board, and then usually after that tipping point, it's not very long until federal victory happens.
Very cool.
Yeah, it just means there's.
Hope, yeah, right, because people I think people think it's so overwhelming to just like change a massive federal law, and that does feel over and almost incomprehensible, like how do you do that? But it does start small. You can start with these state initiatives and then it really is a domino kind of momentum thing. And it's cool to sort of see that track through history with some of these major cultural moments prohibition, marriage equality, and so forth.
When people are advocating for the American government to work better. That is part of a really remarkable legacy of work that goes back really to the founding of the country. Ever since we got this country going, there's been an ongoing effort to just.
Make it work better.
Can you speak more to that legacy broadly and what it's really looked like over the last two hundred years.
Since the very beginning of our government, we've been redesigning it. It's this idea of a more perfect union, right, And maybe it goes without saying, but I need to say anyway that our union has always been far from perfect and continues to be far from perfect this day.
I do love that where we talked about more perfect, more, let's just make it more perfect, like we're getting there. It's always going to be more, like we always have to be making adjustments, trimming the sales.
And we've sort of talked about it like women didn't have the right to vote, people of color didn't have the right to vote.
There have been.
Really big changes and who's allowed to participate in our government and how the rules work. But the way I like to think about this is we absolutely need everyone's voice to be heard. So any restriction of the right to vote is an abridgement on someone's freedom and that's a problem and it needs to be fixed. And at the same time, we have to have a system that is responsive and accountable back to the people that put
our elected officials in power and so represent us. Is about taking the ideas of progress and the sort of momentum and legacy that has been built by the civil rights movement, by the suffragists, and saying, we will continue to perfect this union by making it work better for the people, more perfect.
We'll get there.
What would you say to our listeners out there right now, anyone who might be feeling a little disenchanted or like, what can I do? How can I be part of this process? All of this sounds great, but it's a little out of reach for me, and I'm just depressed, Like, how what would you say to connect to that person.
One of the best stories I've ever heard is a story to four retired women who called themselves the Badass Grandmas. It was two independents, a Democrat and Republican who all just decided, you know what, North Dakota's got too much
corruption and we got to do something about it. And so they, working with represent us and working with some of our partner organisations, did all of the work necessary to get a ballot initiative written, raise the money, get the legal advice, build the political team, and they actually won, and North Dakota went from having some of the weakest transparency and ethics laws in the country to having some
of the strongest. And as a result of that, there were changes in their government, Like, this is real stuff that actually matters.
Isn't that started at a coffee shop?
Isn't that the state where no politicians had to disclose gifts that they got from lobbyists from citizens or Yeah, so the lobbyists could just give them anything, and there was no transparency at all, right, And these badass grandmas were just like, no, that's not a we need to see the dirty work. Yeah, if you're going to be dirty, we need to know. And then well then we're going to.
Vote you out.
That's right.
Yeah, good for them. Can they can they run for president?
Or is that a we've actually we've been cloning them?
Yeah? Good, that sounds good.
Good.
Well, just some movements are built in the modern era.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, snap who. I really really appreciate it, and I think our listeners will too, just hearing a lot of your insight and point of view on this stuff. This is a show about history's greatest screw ups, and I just want to thank you for trying to make our country a little less screwed up.
It is absolutely my pleasure I have the opportunity to have such a thoughtful conversation and to really dig into this stuff is amazing and I'm just glad to be a part of it.
So thanks right on, thank you, sir.
SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
It's executive produced by me.
Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Tino. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. Our story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Calla Poly and A kemedy ekpo Facts checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Our associate producer Torri Smith edited this episode, editing music and sound design by
Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew Chugg is Gilded Audio's creative director. Our amazing theme music is by Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Rizak.