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To respond to the challenging times we are living through, physician, humanitarian and social justice advocate Dr. Paul Zeitz has identified “Revolutionary Optimism” as a new cure for hopelessness, despair, and cynicism. Revolutionary Optimism is itself an infectious, contagious, self-created way of living and connecting with others on the path of love. Once you commit yourself as a Revolutionary Optimist, you can bravely unleash your personal power, #unify with others, and accelerate action for our collective repair, justice, and peace, always keeping love at the center.
Paul - 00:00:00:
So I thought it would be helpful if you could just introduce yourself to our listeners and share with them your personal journey that led you to commit your life to focus on strengthening our US democracy and serving as a democracy reformer and a democracy transformer.
Aditi - 00:00:18:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. So I am the granddaughter of refugees from Pakistan to India and the daughter of migrants from India to the United States. So my personal journey starts there and is informed by being descended from people from the nation's largest or from the world's largest democracy. And all of the complexities of that. So when you talk about a multiracial, multicultural democracy, like India is very much that, right? Across the states of India, people don't speak the same language. They don't eat the same food. They don't worship the same way. So the thing that unifies India is the constitution, which is very similar to the United States and quite different from lots of other places around the world that are democracies. For me, growing up, as I was learning American history, my parents were learning it alongside of me. So I really got to see it through their eyes as well. So I remember, for example, learning about the Declaration of Independence and my dad being like, “Thomas Jefferson was 32 years old”, which I was eight. I thought 32 was very old. I do not find it to be very old anymore. But very much through sort of their awe and lens, they say there's no zealot like a convert, right? So no one loves America like immigrants. But as I got older and went to high school and college and both of those experiences for me were at predominantly white institutions, I both through sort of what I was learning about history and structures and systems, but also through my personal experiences in those places, I began to realize that we do not fulfill the promises and the aspirations that are laid out in our founding documents and certainly not for all Americans, maybe for some but not for all. And I became really interested in why that was and how you could shift it. And so on that journey, I started off very curious about individual causes. So I got really fascinated with Angela Duckworth's research on grit and resilience and things like that at the time. And then as I read critiques of it, people were talking about the lack of focus on systemic, but the systemic issues and a kind of systemic analysis. And so as I started diving more into systemic causes, that brought me to the law. And as I started learning more about who were policymakers and how do you become a person who is a policymaker, I found out that most of those people were lawyers. So I got interested in going to law school. So I spent some time after college working at the Manhattan DA's office because I was particularly focused on criminal justice reform and all of the policymakers I saw doing criminal justice work were former prosecutors. And then I went to law school and I spent, you know, most of my time in law school focused on criminal justice issues. So my internships and clinics were like the Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice Reform, Brooklyn DA's Office, NYCLU, Eastern District of New York Prosecution, like all very criminal justice related. And then in my last year at NYU Law School, Donald Trump became president. And so some of the folks that I was working with, outside of the law school I was organizing with, and I co-founded an organization called Resistance Manual. And the goal of that, it was really, I was doing my own research on the policies Donald Trump was proposing and the mechanisms for putting them into practice. So they were talking about repealing the ACA and replacing it through budget reconciliation. I didn't know what budget reconciliation was, right? The Muslim ban via executive order. I didn't know if any of these things were possible. So I was studying up and learning them for myself. And it was kind of complicated. And I thought maybe other people would find this useful. So, when we launched. Almost immediately there were 300 volunteers who showed up in our Slack to help. And so I began organizing them. It was a wiki that we were using to populate the wiki, provide information, keep it updated. So that's what I was doing my last semester of law school, much to my mother's dismay because I was not going to classes and my parents were very worried I was not going to graduate law school. And that last semester as well, I had the opportunity to attend some gatherings because there were a lot of new emerging organizations and Divisible had launched at the same time, Flip the Vote, others. And so there were efforts to bring together legacy organizations that were sort of re-evaluating their work and what they needed to do, and the new organizations to put sort of the new landscape in a room together and have folks get to know one another. And at one of those gatherings in... 2017, I met Ian Bassin at Protect Democracy, and I felt as though our analysis of the problem, that this is not a left-versus-right problem, but a democracy-versus-authoritarianism problem, were super aligned. And he actually tried to recruit me to go to Protect Democracy as I was leaving law school. And I was like, “I don't know, startup nonprofits are weird and hard. I'm a lawyer. I was going to be a lawyer”. So I took a job working for the governor of New York doing housing policy. And Ian was like, “you're going to be bored if you go and do that”. I was like, “I'm going to be fine. I just wanted to be a normal lawyer”. So I was bored after two months and so I started looking around and trying to figure out what I could do. This was more like six months. And then I reached out to Ian as well, and they hired me at Protect Democracy within a month. So I was the first communications hire at Protect Democracy. Within the first year, I became communications director. I hired and built out our team there. And I was also working on other types of projects. So I was, in addition to the communications work I was doing, I was leading our pardon efforts. We were filing litigation in the Joe Arpaio case, arguing that his pardon was unconstitutional. There was other work sort of outside of the comms work. And then in 2020, I passed along the comms director title. I had trained up and passed along that work to leading the communications team to one of my colleagues. And I became co-director of our elections work. And as part of that, I ran the national task force on election crises during the 2020 cycle, which was focused on ensuring we had a smooth transition of power. So it was entirely focused on the post-election period. And because of COVID, we actually didn't have a plan to be public with the task force. The idea was that the task force would be kind of silent unless there was a post-election crisis. But there ended up being a pre-election crisis with the pandemic. So we used that as an opportunity to launch the task force and put out guidance on changes secretaries of states and other election administrators should be making during the primaries to ensure access to the ballot. And that put us in a position to, ahead of the election, to do a lot of priming of different folks. So we brought together news outlets, we talked to social media companies, business leaders, celebrities, all kinds of folks about what to expect post-election. And then after the election cycle in 21, I led our political culture team, which was our first sort of entree into that work, which was really thinking about the demand side of authoritarianism. Why do people want authoritarian leaders? Why do they vote for them? So you can have a candidate like Donald Trump, but if no one votes for him, then there's nothing. And that sort of set of work led me to Democracy 2076, where I am today.
Paul - 00:07:52:
Excellent. Thank you for sharing that journey. I think it's really interesting and important for our listeners to hear from you about that pathway. First of all, I want to acknowledge you for your commitment to serving for democratic rights and the work that you did on criminal justice and how the front line of that work, dealing with real people in real circumstances, you took that on. And then you had a wake-up call, it sounded like, as the Trump phenomena began. And you then began really looking at the broader system. And then we introduced you as a futurist, and that was accurate because you were already considering election crises during 2020 and 2021. And boy, we did have major ones with the pandemic, as you say, but also with almost the lack of a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in US history. So you were already onto that way before most of us thought that that kind of risk was even possible. So thank you for your foresight on that. So I do want you to share, if you will, a little bit about, well, not a little bit, a lot of it about Democracy 26. And I know you just launched it earlier this year, and we understand that it is still an early formation phase, but as a visionary and a futurist, I want our listeners to hear your vision, actually, of what you're aiming to do with this new initiative, Democracy 2076.
Aditi - 00:09:23:
Yeah, so through the course of whatever the last six, seven years, what really became clear to me was that so much of the work that we were doing was really defensive and reactive. And so it felt like we were really playing whack-a-mole. During the 2018 cycle, we filed a lawsuit in Georgia about the Secretary of State overseeing an election in which he was a candidate as governor. And then two weeks later, we were filing a similar lawsuit in Florida, right? And challenges we saw during the 2018 election cycle, we saw again during the 2020 election cycle. And so what became obvious to me was that litigation, very useful tool to sort of stop harms in the moment. Sometimes you can change laws permanently, but often it's like you plug a hole in one place and then there's another gaping hole somewhere else. And as I began sort of peeling back the layers to assess why that was. What really became clear to me was that at the crux of it, it's our structures in the Constitution, right? Our Constitution is not designed to create a majoritarian result where the will of the majority gains political expression. We have minoritarian structures in the Constitution. The Electoral College is an example. The Supreme Court is an example. The Senate is an example. All of these structures are not about majority will, majority rule. And our Constitution was not designed for political parties. The founders thought that the different branches of government would sort of compete for power. So it wasn't designed with the idea that you would have a political party that would capture the different branches of government and exert their will. So the concept of unified government was not a concept that the founders would have had. And so in futures work, the phrase I've often heard is fit for purpose. Are you building a structure, an infrastructure that's fit for purpose? Does it do the thing that you're wanting it to do? And our Constitution was perhaps fit for purpose in the 1790s, but we have minimally updated it since then, and so to me, it feels not quite fit for purpose. A lot of the ideas and aspirations, I still think are wonderful and is brilliant document, but in the introduction, we're talking about the scale of crises we're facing and intersecting crises, and I don't think it's fit for purpose. And then beyond that, when you think about, so that's sort of one component of the work, is what is the constitution we need for 2076? And the idea is not that we want to have it by 2076. Ideally, we'd like to have it much, much sooner. But often our governance is done in a reactive way where we are advocating for governing for policies and legislation. For the present to deal with challenges in the present, or sometimes to repair and deal with challenges from the past. Very rarely in the US context, are we building governance and governing infrastructure for the future. So the idea of anchoring it in 2076 is to invite the question and notion of what is the constitution we need for 2076, and let's build that today, so that what we build is actually resilient into these intersecting crises that we sort of know are coming for us over the next 50 years.
Paul - 00:12:39:
Or some people think they're here now.
Aditi - 00:12:40:
So this is the other thing, right? They say that the future's already here, it's unevenly divided. And so there are pieces of it that are here in different pockets around the world, but they're felt very unevenly right now. And especially for a crisis like climate, it's not a crisis that you can buy your way out of, that sort of regardless of who you are and how you are, when there's wildfire smoke in the air, like you're all breathing in that smoke, when the sea levels rise and the place where I live is underwater, like there's no amount of money that gets me out of that sort of situation. And so, right now, there are ways that some folks are insulated and we're experiencing these crises very differently and the consequences of them differently across the globe, but that will be less and less true as we move forward and the scale of the crises get larger. And then the other two pieces of this work, which are related, are around imagining 2076 and pro-democracy political parties for 2076. So the imagination work is, you know, there's this old Gloria Steinem, and I'm sure she borrowed it from someone, but I heard it from Gloria Steinem, quote of that, like, “you can't see, you can't be what you can't see”. And that was said in the context of women's representation in film and TV and the kinds of roles that they have. But I think that's also true for our democracy. So over the last 25 years, we've gone from shows like The West Wing to shows like Veep and House of Cards and Scandal. We've gone from depictions of the future like Star Trek to Hunger Games and The Last of Us. And that trajectory tells people two things. On the governing side, it tells people that the type of people who run for office or rich people with daddy issues who are doing it because like their fathers didn't hug them. And that when they're in office, if you take scandal, for example, they steal elections, kill Supreme Court justices with their bare hands, have affairs with their chief of staff. And run for re-election. And so it really does not inspire a lot of faith and confidence in governing. And then on the future side, you're seeing these very dystopian versions of the future where people are literally battling for basic resources. And in that context, I work in democracy, I am a lawyer, I barely want to vote. Like when you watch stuff like that, you're like, why? What's the point if that's where we're headed towards? Why would you be engaged? Why would you do this work? And I think that there could be an argument from some folks that Hollywood is sort of reflecting the reality that people are experiencing and seeing. But if you think about, for example, stealing an election, on Scandal, the plot line for Six Seasons of Scandal was that in his first election, President Grant had altered a voting machine, and that was how he stole elections. And that, Scandal aired, I think, in 2014. Like it was, it was way before the 2020 election, right? And so then in 2020, when Donald Trump stands up and says, “hey, like Dominion voting systems modify their voting machines and they stole the election from me”. And election administrators and experts stand up and say, “that's actually not possible”. The American public says, “I watched it for six years on TV”. Like I watch it every Thursday night on ABC, right? And so like almost half of Americans don't receive any civic education. A third of Americans actively avoid political news coverage. So people are getting their civic education and information from film and TV. And for my money, it's having a big impact. So the goal of that piece of work is to do a set of research, tracing the trajectory over the last 25 years and the impact on civic attitude and engagement. And bringing together folks in Hollywood about what can we do about it? What are the resources that they need to tell more accurate stories that are still interesting and exciting and high stakes, but are not sort of priming the American public to think authoritarian tactics are acceptable and without consequence. And so like there was drama on the West Wing, but there were consequences. When the president lied about his MS, he was censured. When the vice president had an affair, he resigned, right? There were consequences for unethical or illegal behavior. And we're not seeing that in our modern sort of depictions.
Paul - 00:17:08:
Yeah, before you go on, I just want to pause here for a second and ask you, what is your vision for the kind of entertainment and education that you would like Hollywood to put out? Like if you could just give us like a snapshot vision of what you would like it to show that would inspire the kind of authentic democratic, multiracial, multicultural democracy that you're aiming toward.
Aditi - 00:17:35:
So I think there are good examples that are already happening. So it's not about like, I'm not a writer, I'm not a storyteller. But like when I look at like The Diplomat or Madam Secretary, those are shows that depict governing and governance and talk about, especially in The Diplomat, they talked about the frustrations of bureaucracy and these rules that seem unnecessary and asinine and they actually depict a really interesting conflict between the current ambassador and the former ambassador who is her husband. And they're sort of depicting like, he doesn't want to follow the rules and she's more by the book and there's a line she says where she's like. It all seems great and expeditious and whatever, but there are consequences. And like the rules are this way for a reason. And that's not always true. I'm not like, “if you knew me, I'm not a big rule follower”. It's not that I'm like, you know, wanting to toe the line in every instance, but sometimes processes are outdated and antiquated and don't make sense and those should be changed. But sometimes they're there for a reason, there's a purpose to them. And so I think depicting that kind of attention and that conflict and having that conversation about like when are they useful and fit for purpose and when are they not is really valuable.
Paul - 00:18:47:
Excellent. Okay, sorry to deviate that way, but onto the third pillar of your work.
Aditi - 00:18:53:
So the third pillar of the work is around pro-democracy political parties for 2076. So in the United States, our political parties realign every 30 years or so. It's been in this cycle for centuries that every 30 years or so, the wedge issues that divide the political parties shift, the coalitions that are inside of the political parties shift. And so we are currently living through a realignment right now, which folks can feel, even if you didn't have that vocabulary, folks can feel that you're like, this is not the Republican Party I grew up with. This is not George Bush's Republican Party. This is not Reagan's Republican Party. So the shift we're currently experiencing is a shift from a Republican Party that is organized and driven by white evangelicals, small seat conservativism, meaning small government, libertarian ideals, business focus, to an explicitly white, ethno-fascist party. And so meaning that the appeals are explicitly racial and racialized with like, “make America great again, build the wall, Muslim ban type of rhetoric”. And the Republican Party was always quite committed to democracy and to democracy in the US and around the world. And that is no longer the case as we are seeing election interference, election denialism, spreading of misinformation during the 2020 cycle. And during COVID, Donald Trump was the biggest spreader of misinformation. It was coming from inside the House. And what we know about these sort of transitions is that whatever the new status quo is. And so political scientists would tell us that if in 24 the candidate who runs is a Trumpy-like candidate, even if it's not Trump, but if it's someone in that ilk, that, and particularly if they lose, that this version of the Republican Party will be what we'll have for the next 30 years or so. So the question is, what happens to our next political realignment? As we look to 2054, how do we shape the trajectory of how the parties shift and emerge? So that the next realignment leads to having pro-democracy political parties. And so if you think back to where, so it felt like in 2016 everyone was like, “what the fuck just happened? How do we suddenly have this”, right? But if you actually look back at the data, you actually start to see low information white voters who political science describes as racial conservative, which means that they are racist, leave the Democratic Party starting in about 2010. So you can actually see the constant, you can see this white racial animus concentrating in the Republican Party in the data, if you look back to 2010. And so if someone had been doing foresight 30 years ago, back in 94, they would have noticed those trends in post-2008 of voters moving. To the party and they would have been like, “oh, maybe we should be doing some type of intervention. Maybe there's a de-radicalization effort to be doing”. And there was a lot of that work that started happening post 2016 with like bridge building groups, lots of conversation about civility, lots of interview for voters in Ohio, right? But all that happened after we were really on this path of transitioning when you could start seeing the shifts six years before. So there were six years where folks were being picked off and radicalized that there was really no intervention happening. And so the question we have going forward is, can we do some strategic foresight now and lay out, what are say five scenarios for where the political parties might be in 2054? What are the pathways and trend lines that will determine which scenario we end up in? And can we be trying to steer the ship in the present? So examples of things might be, there is a growing Hindu nationalist movement in the United States, right? So that is an authoritarian Hindu movement in the Indian-American community that very much mirrors what you see in India with Modi. The co-chair of the Republican Hindu Committee is Steve Bannon. So it's the same playbook across efforts at extremism, different efforts to break off groups and bring them to sort of an authoritarian appeal. And as the country becomes increasingly diverse, I would hypothesize that the fault lines are not going to be racialized in the same way. And we've already started actually to see that in the last election. We started seeing more Black men and more Latino men voting for Donald Trump than we had in previous cycles. These are right now weak signals, like they're small trends, but over 30 years, these can become stronger signals. These are the types of things where we start seeing like some indication and you're not sure if it's noise or a trend just yet, but you want to be paying attention to, so as it becomes stronger, you're prepared to intervene. The other thing is that the wedge issues for the future look really different. So when you look at the polling for millennial and Gen Z, current issues that are highly contested in wedge issues in our politics are not wedge issues. Same-sex marriage, abortion, unions, the role of government should be of small government, or larger more active involved government, systemic racism. Millennials and Gen Z, including Republican Millennials and Gen Z, all agree on these issues. The three issues that they're divided on are trust in our political system, climate change, and trans rights. So those are going to be the dividing wedge issues in the future. And so those are issues I think where you would want, and right now it's not divided 50-50, it's divided a third, a third, a third on those issues. So there are a third of Millennials and Gen Z who don't yet know what they think. So when you think about voter education, youth education for young folks, I would say from our current polling data, like those are the issues where we'd want to invest, because those are the ones that are going to likely be what divides our political parties in the future. And we can see that, those trends now. So-
Paul - 00:24:58:
Yeah, so let me just summarize if I can, the three major pillars of your work. One is about imagining and future scenarios of what a constitution could look like in 2076 from where we are now. And then also political culture, as we understand that Hollywood and the entertainment industry influences how Americans think about what's possible and what a future we're living into. That needs to be modernized, I guess, or transformed in some way. And then the third area that you just described is around political party realignment and ensuring that our political parties stand for democracy. So I think that's a brilliant trio of efforts. One of the things that I'm wanting to explore with you now is that, 2076 is the 300th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, and it's in 2023 right now. Many people that I'm interacting with are focused on what is happening right now in 2023, and we're not going to go into all the craziness that's happening, and then anticipating what might happen in 2024. How do you get people to think beyond this immediate kind of phase of probable political crisis that we're living through? I mean, it's like you feel it, as you said. And then how do you pull out of that and think 50 years in the future? How do you get people to be part of that journey?
Aditi - 00:26:34:
So right now as we're building this initial set of work, it's not really requiring a lot of persuasion. Most of the folks that I'm talking to who are sort of on the front lines of organizing this work, organizing at the state and local level, are extremely exhausted, burnt out, and tired of constantly being in a defensive and reactive position. And dealing with crisis after crisis. And they see how others and how movements have worked in the past. And where we have had wins in the past. And often those wins have come from having clear affirmative vision of what it is we're trying to build towards. And being marred in sort of our current intersection crises. Means that most folks, when you ask them what their vision for the future is, what they would like to see. They can feel that their ideas of what would be ideal are lacking. They can feel the lack of sort of space and imagination they have to think about it. Most folks will say to you, “I barely have time to think about the next two to three years, let alone the next 50 years”. And so there is a real craving and desire to have more clarity on what it is we are building towards. During the 2020 cycle, I was asked to speak to a bunch of organizers who were doing GOTV and registering people to vote. And someone asked me, “what do I say to a young person who says it doesn't matter who I vote for, that both sides are sort of terrible and neither side is really going to bring about the policy outcomes I want?” And at that time in 2020, I said, “tell them it's harm reduction. That one side is going to do more harm than the other”. That's a terrible answer. No one gets in the street to march for harm reduction. No one mobilizes and just phone banking for harm reduction. It's not inspiring and exciting. So many of the people my age who are invested in politics right now, who work in our political system right now, with Obama's message of hope and change back in 2008 and prior to that, I know so many people have a story of like, “I was in college and I left and I got in my car and went to Iowa or New Hampshire, wherever, to just get in on this vision of hope and change”. And the reason you have Obama, Bernie, Trump voters is because people can feel that what we're currently doing is not working, incremental reform is not working, that there is a desire for more radical change. So all three of them had very different visions of what that change would be, but they were all radical and really spoke to the pain that people are feeling. It's not requiring a lot of persuasion. What the thing is, is folks don't really have a framework for which to think about a 50 year time horizon and time and space to do it. And so the goal of Democracy 2076 is to create that framework to facilitate that conversation and to hold that space. So rather than every organization around the country having to sit there and comb through data and think about what are likely scenarios for the next 50 years, that we can sort of do that for them. Instead of thinking about what are the likely crises over the next 50 years, we can sort of do that for them. We can create a facilitation. We can hold space over a couple of days for folks to participate. And the goal is not just to have what are the scenarios of the Constitution we might want for 2076, but to really build a campaign to bring it about. Because right now, there are only a couple of campaigns around constitutional change happening. One is the ERA, the other is around Citizens United. But most, there's very little advocacy work thinking about the root causes of the challenges that we have right now, which I believe are largely constitutional. And as a result, policy positions and legislative goals that I would think are pretty moderate, like paid parental leave, that's the most sort of extreme version of that position. In Germany, you have a community, you have a right, like a constitutional right, to community support for families. And so I think that the idea and the goal of having clarity on constitutional amendments we would want and campaigns to bring them about is that, It's one of those, like, even if you shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you land among the stars sort of thing. So it shifts the over 10 window and allows legislative reforms that are incremental to be properly understood that way. And build broader coalitions. And I think like creates a more aspirational clear vision of what it is we actually need.
Paul - 00:31:15:
I just want to explain to our listeners, if I could, what exactly an Overton window is. So an Overton window, as my understanding is that it's an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability. And it creates a space where politicians say they can only act within an acceptable range of possibility. And shifting the Overton window or expanding the Overton window allows for transformational policies and a broader imagination of what's possible to be in place. Do I have that right? Can you just help me make sure our listeners understand what you mean by creating space for political possibility, for political transformation, it sounds like that's what you're talking about. Is that right?
Aditi - 00:32:03:
Yeah, that's exactly right. So if right now, if you take the paid parental leave, for example, like that is right now, at least what I've seen, the most sort of common, like we should have paid parental leave is the most legislatively, like there are legislative proposals for that. I've seen as the most radical sort of idea that's out there. I'm not saying it's like the most radical idea that's out there, but it's the one that's most acceptable. So politicians, like that's often the furthest they will go. And then on the other side, it's sort of the status quo, right? Where we have no paid parental leave at all. And so in between what you're trying to do is how many months. But if you anchor it further out and you say, actually, we want a constitutional right to community support for families that includes all manner of things that would allow you to sue the government for not providing you the support that you need, whether that's childcare, postpartum doulas, paid parental leave, healthcare, like a whole range of things, then it makes the idea of paid parental leave look like a much more moderate position because you're actively sort of campaigning on a bigger, broader idea. And you can see the overarching window shifting on other topics. We've seen that over time, right? So, for example, if you think about the fight for marriage equality, When I was in high school, like in debate club, we would talk about like, should you have same sex marriage? And the moderate position at the time, the kind of centrist position was civil unions. And civil unions was like acceptable sort of middle ground position with marriage sort of over here. But once a lot of states created civil unions, it shifted the window because then civil unions became the norm. And so then marriage became. And so you see that even with like the Bill Clinton sign, don't ask, don't tell, it was considered this very progressive thing to do that we're not going to kick you out of the military. If you don't tell us you're gay, we don't know you're gay. You can be in the military. That was considered progressive because people weren't outing people and weren't trying to kick them out. When Obama repealed it, it's because it was no longer progressive because the Overton window had shifted and it was like people should be allowed to be out and be in the military. And that's not a problem. And so our ideas of what is acceptable in the range of acceptability shifts over time. And so part of this effort is about shifting the Overton window on a range of things.
Paul - 00:34:26:
Yeah. Thank you. I have so many questions. And I wanted to kind of shift back to the personal. I want to ask you about your response to the dystopian possibilities of the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And do you ever get despairing or hopeless? You're taking on this huge vision and in a bold and exciting way, thank you for your leadership. I just wanted to ask you to share a little bit personally, like, do you ever like not want to get out of bed and feel like this is too big and too much? And if that ever happens to you, how do you deal with it? How do you get yourself back on the saddle of, you know, bringing forward constitutional transformation?
Aditi - 00:35:10:
So I definitely get like despairing and hopeless. Actually, last week was probably like the most depressed I've been in a very long while. Like I was really there. But the reason I feel despair and hopeless is when I feel like other people don't care. So as long as I feel like I'm in community and I can sort of see the people around me working with me to bring about the changes that we need, I don't feel despair and hopeless because everything we do, we do collectively and everything that sort of is happening and feels really scary are all things that were manmade and created, which means we can create alternate possibilities. I feel very clear that nothing is inevitable, that we get to be architects of the future and decide what happens. The challenge is we've gone down certain pathways for a long time and now we need to course correct. And so if there are enough of us, we can course correct. If we have ideas and there are enough people, we can course correct. And I'm not claiming that I have the right set of ideas or I have some particular wisdom. It's just clear to me that we need to course correct and I'm going to sort of throw my hat in the ring to try a tactic or a strategy that I'm not seeing used. It might not work, but then like we've tried one more thing and we can learn from that and we'll try something else, right? Where I start to feel despair and hopeless is when folks are just, where it feels like no one else cares and then I'm like, “what am I even doing here?” And so what happened to me last week was really, I think actually it was just because it was the end of summer. It had been sort of a couple of weeks towards the end of summer where, as I was reaching out to folks about this set of work, no one was responding. Everything was taking really a long time and I have just been kind of heads down and so I wasn't appropriately contextualizing that and being like, “it's end of summer. People are busy. They'll get back to me next week”. I was like, “no one cares”. Like, why am I trying to do this if no one else even gives a shit? If this is what it is, like I can just amass my pile of wealth and take care of me and myself if we're just going to be all individualistic about it, right? Like I was feeling very frustrated. But when I am in community and I can see that and it's clear to me that there are a lot of us sort of working towards it, to me, then the changes that we're talking about feel inevitable. It's about growing the us that sees this clearly and is working towards it. Then you just have to grow the us sufficiently till you hit a tipping point and then it comes about.
Paul - 00:37:51:
Yes, thank you for being so open about your experience last week, and we all have those moments and those days or those weeks. And many people live in that sense of hopelessness and despair. And so we're kind of like popping the bubble and saying, “hey, there's a possibility here that we could imagine a new way of doing things that brings the vision of the founding documents into a manifest reality”. There's a gap there that you're trying to close here with your work, so I really salute you for that. Maybe the last question can be about, how do you build a movement that's interpartisan, interracial, interreligious, interspiritual, to bring that critical mass of people into this opportunity that you're creating? Some people say we need 5% of the population or 10% of the population. I don't know what the tipping point is about engagement. I wonder your thoughts about how to build a movement that can lift this vision and this future repair option that you're proposing as a possibility? How do we bring that into reality?
Aditi - 00:39:06:
One person at a time, right? So that's always what it is. That is what organizing is. It is one person at a time. And when you do power mapping, which is basically an exercise where you, on the Y-axis you put who has power, on the X-axis you put who is like the range of positions. And so the idea, and then you map people. And what becomes clear is like there are some people who are really far away, who really just don't agree with you, they're never going to agree with you. But on this set of stuff, it feels to me like it's not that they're like people who really disagree with a certain set of ideas. It's most people aren't thinking about this set of ideas. And that's a huge opportunity space. The best time to persuade someone is when they don't know what they think about something yet. Once someone has an idea clear and they have a position, whether it's well-informed or not, it's very hard to change people's minds on things. And most of the tactics we have of debate, et cetera, just further entrench people into their views. What we know works in terms of shifting people's minds and thinking is listening. So as I have been inviting folks to the December gathering to figure out what is the constitution we need for 2076, and then we'll reconvene in June on how we built a campaign towards that. The biggest thing I've been doing is I've been laying out for people sort of what we're planning to do in December. And then I ask them, like, “what do you think about that? What are you seeing in your communities?” And then I'm listening. And actually, oftentimes in those conversations, I spend the first half of the conversation asking them about their work, what they're working on, what are the challenges they're seeing, and really listening, because then the way I explain this work to them I tailor it a bit to sort of meet them where they are. And I think that's really the whole thing that like people, everyone is dealing with some set of challenges. And so inviting people in to say there is... Right now I'm talking mostly to organizers, it's that there are ways we can be approaching this work that will feel better for you, that it will not be so defensive and reactive, and we can be in a more affirmative position. But I think for folks who are listening, who are feeling a despair or uncertainty about the future, I think the whole thing is to do something. You don't have to do everything. No one can do everything. Our positionality is all different. But I think often folks in an effort to become, or to be informed citizens. Consume all the news, are aware of all the problems. There's been an increasing trend of what they call political hobbyism. So you're a hobbyist if you like enjoy reading about politics and learning about politics, but don't do anything in politics. You don't organize, you don't knock on doors. My parents were like this for a long time. So they would talk to me about politics and what they were reading and what they were learning. And I kept asking them, but what are you doing? And then they slowly started doing more canvassing, donating some money, right? And so bit by bit, you can kind of move people up a ladder of engagement. The antidote to despair and fear is action, is to be doing something. And you don't need to do all the things. And for me, often over the course of the last decade of work, I don't read a lot of news. I probably just started reading about climate again in the last couple of years as I was doing this intersecting work on democracy. The last 10 years, I wasn't reading criminal justice news, climate news, as I was working, I only was consuming stuff on the stuff I was working on because it just leaves you paralyzed to be reading about all kinds of things that you just don't feel like you can do anything about. And so I would say, “pick one thing, even if it's very local, like it's your neighborhood park, and do that thing and focus your attention on that”. I think being aware of all of the things and then not being able to do anything about them, because we only have so much time in a day, can be really paralyzing for people.
Paul - 00:43:10:
Yeah, thank you, Aditi. I appreciate you. And I really honor all those approaches that you talked about in terms of a sense of belonging, that we're not alone. We're in this together. Do what you can within your life and your journey, wherever you're at on it. And take action and be in the game of healing and transformation. So thank you for your leadership. And we look forward to hearing about your progress in the months and years ahead. Have a great day.
Aditi – 00:43:41:
Thank you.