A Rejection of Democrats or a Rejection of Democracy?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Madiba K. Dennie:

I’m not fully prepared to say it was a rejection of democracy itself. Although I am prepared to say rejection of Democrats,

Lawrence Goldstone:

People might’ve voted for an anti-democratic system, but they didn’t know that. They did not think they were voting to abolish democracy. They thought they were voting for democracy and they should run the show.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guests on SideBar Madiba, Dennie and Lawrence Goldstone

SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the College of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

Welcome to SideBar discussions with local, state and national experts about protecting our most critical individual and civil rights Co-hosts La Deans, Jackie Gardina, and Mitch Winick.

Mitch Winick:

In today’s episode of SideBar, we are discussing what many are considering a historic election. Constitutional historians, Lawrence Goldstone and Madiba K. Dennie Join us to discuss the context and concerns following the 2024 presidential election. Madiba k Dennie is an attorney columnist and professor whose work focuses on fostering an equitable multiracial democracy. Her debut book, the Originalism Trap, how Extremists Stole The Constitution and How the People Can Take It Back pushes back against the So-called originalist model of constitutional interpretation being favored by the current conservative Supreme Court majority and encourages us to redirect our efforts to protect the ideals of democracy. Lawrence Goldstone is an award-winning historian and author of Imperfect Union, how Errors of Omission Threaten Constitutional Democracy. His book provides unique insight into how current challenges to our constitutional rights and the tensions between federal and state protected rights stems from the framers unwillingness to confront issues that they knew back in 1787 could be future threats to democratic ideals. Both Madiba and Larry provide us with a unique historical context for the principles set out in the Constitution more than 200 years ago, and the framework of individual freedom and democracy that many of us believe may be at risk following the 2024 presidential election.

Jackie Gardina:

Larry and Madiba, we’ve had you on the show before. Both of you have offered amazing insights based on your historical experience and research as well as your insights into what’s going to happen or is happening. When we first invited you, I think Mitch and I hoped that what we would be doing is talking about the historic election of the first woman president, the first multiracial president, black and Southeast Asian, and instead we’re here to talk about a very different outcome than what we anticipated. And with that different outcome is really a different future. We thought it would be helpful to perhaps talk about both what your reactions are initially to the election as well as what you’re anticipating and thinking about in terms of future state.

Mitch Winick:

So Madiba, just start with you, share with us some of your thoughts.

Madiba K. Dennie:

To be entirely honest, I was a bit surprised about the outcome. I had sort of assumed that we were going to see more of a replay of the previous election, and so I thought, oh, it’ll probably be close. It’ll probably be some lawsuits afterwards. I had been mentally preparing for litigation nonsense and for sort of wacky claims that were already beginning to percolate as Trump and Allied folks were trying to think about how can we win this in the courts if we don’t win this out. So that’s what they were preparing for and that’s what I was preparing for. So then I was caught off guard for them to win pretty clearly outright that I wasn’t prepared for and even less prepared. Now, a few days out from that to see that the GOP will actually have a trifecta having the presidency and both chambers of Congress, I couldn’t have even anticipated that that was going to happen. So I’m now really trying to brace myself for the future and think about how folks can push back

Lawrence Goldstone:

Going in. I predicted that the polls would be wrong and I predicted that we would know the result on Tuesday night. I thought they’d be wrong in the other direction and that we would know the result Tuesday night. So I was kind of two out of three, but I missed the big one. I don’t think we can get away from the basic truth that this was democracy in action. This was not an anti-democratic process. It was an anti-democratic vote. The upshot of having a democratic electorate vote for a form of democracy that was going to be incredibly limited, much more limited and maybe non-existent. That is what we are dealing with now, but we can’t pretend that it was anything else than this was the will of the people. I mean, you just look at the vote, it wasn’t close and that is a scary concept.

Jackie Gardina:

So let me just push back a little bit and see what your reaction is to this and Madiba, I’d welcome you to come in as well. Yes, we held an election and yes, the votes have been counted and we have President-elect Trump, but the efforts to suppress votes in multiple areas and in multiple states taking away mail-in votes, purging voter rolls in advance, making it more challenging for people to vote with eliminating polling places so that you had to wait 3, 4, 7 hours. How does that fit in with the idea that this was a democratic process?

Madiba K. Dennie:

I was having a very similar thought. I was thinking this was a democratic election, but also only insofar as it wasn’t any more on Democratic than our usual elections where we already have all sorts of voter suppression, already have disenfranchised, big swaths of people, and also that it’s only a fraction of the country makes up the electorate. So I think on one hand I have experienced a sort of shock and trying to reckon with what you were describing, Lawrence is saying a majority of people chose this, but also at the same token, as more and more votes are being counted and it’s like, well, maybe it’s not actually majority, maybe it’ll turn out being a plurality. We’ll see how it goes. And then also looking at all the people who decided to stay home or all the people who couldn’t vote. I think that’s almost a little bit reassuring in a sense about who my fellow residents of the country are not reassuring us about how our democracy works. It makes me think maybe we should actually emphasize how narrow of a subset that population is and maybe that would be useful for undercutting the idea of Trump coming in saying, I want this overwhelming majority. I now have this mandate to really go hard and do all sorts of horrible egregious things. So maybe it would actually be useful to say this was a democratic election, but only so democratic.

Lawrence Goldstone:

That’s a little rosy. The magnitude of the loss was voter suppression. Sure, all of the injustices in terms of the vote that you described exist, but if they did not exist, the margins of victory for the Republicans, I don’t think it made a difference. I think unfortunately, I don’t think we can take comfort in the fact that well, if more people voted, the result would’ve been different. I don’t think the result would’ve been different. I don’t think there was a Democrat who could have won. I thought Harris ran a professional campaign. The skeptics were wrong. She was an effective candidate. The idea that she didn’t present economic specifics, oh yeah, Trump did. He’s going to a hundred percent tariffs. This was a choice by this country to move in this direction and it is a scary choice to get back to where the country moves in the direction that all of us wanted to. We must be clear-eyed into what actually happened and why it happened, and that’s a whole different subject.

Mitch Winick:

Let me ask you this because you terrified me enough with your book on the originalism trap when you talk about how extremists stole the constitution. So now we have all three branches of government that have essentially been taken over by this extremist viewpoint. You still sounded a little hopeful. I actually was going the other direction and you set me down that path. So tell me how I can be saved.

Madiba K. Dennie:

How can you be saved? I’m trying to figure that out, Mitch. I do totally agree with you, Lawrence, that I don’t want to discount the agency of the millions of people who did choose this and saying a lot of people did elect to have fascism rather than democracy. That is deeply disturbing, and I haven’t come to a decision yet, but I have been thinking about the question you raise of could any Democrat have one? And I think that what that sort of points to is a need to do lots of community building, mobilizing work, thinking clearly there’s some sort of disconnect with the population and there needs to be a hearts and mind change. So people don’t want to choose authoritarianism. Maybe that could be Mitch, at least a small source of hope and thinking of what we’re capable of and saying we need to sort of rally the people and connect with one another to address this big problem. But if we look at it as something that can be addressed with education, with outreach, with network, with connecting with our communities, maybe that gives us at least some semblance of a path.

Lawrence Goldstone:

I think you’re totally right. This is the money ball of politics. You’ve got to play small ball. The federal government is gone and it is going to be gone for at least two years and probably longer. If you look at the Senate races coming up in 2026, the chances of retaking the Senate are near zero. The house you’re going to be dealing with gerrymandering, the Supreme Court we don’t even want to think about. I agree totally. The answer is to start locally, get back to basics, do what we can, set up programs to educate because we clearly lack an educated electorate in this country. We have to initiate the kinds of changes on small levels that people look on a wider level and say, wow, that’s going to work. Remember in 2000, the conservatives were in exactly the same position. The Democrats controlled everything and they went to school board elections, they went to city elections, town elections, and they took over and from there they built up and all the gerrymandering and states like say North Carolina stemmed from that 2010 election when the Democrats just completely failed. And I think we need to take a page from what the conservatives did and not look in these broad thing that we’re going to change the country without changing it locally first.

Madiba K. Dennie:

I do think that the conservatives have done a much better job over the past several decades at least than liberals have at both that sort of smaller scale starting locally, but also the thinking long-term, having these sort of extended game plans of this is how we’re going to make transformational change happen years from now. I think that we don’t have that sort of long-term planning, at least not to the same extent. Some folks are trying to do some of this, I’m not trying to say they don’t exist, but it’s just not even comparable levels.

Lawrence Goldstone:

There are a lot of local groups and many of them are obviously frustrated and depressed. There’s a group in Wisconsin called Block Black Leaders Organizing Communities, which is fabulous, run by this incredible woman, and they did all they could, they voter registration. It must start there. And in 2026, in 2025, actually whatever races are run there, there is a discipline that the conservative MEA is exactly right. There’s a discipline that the conservatives has exhibited that the liberals did not. I think one of the other things you need to do is to go to all these billionaires who kick in tens of millions of dollars on national elections and say, Hey, wait a second, let’s start a school program in this community. Let us fund supplemental medical care. Let’s start building from the bottom. Find talented people, get them into the right positions. It isn’t sexy, but it works.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to follow up on something Madiba said, which is, and Madiba, I had the same reaction, which is I was so disappointed in the American electorate, I just had a much higher hope that the electorate was seeing and believing what I was seeing and believing. You’ve said those who voted for president-elect Trump voted for fascism. And I think what I want to ask is something that Lawrence had said earlier before we started recording, which is this a rejection of Democrats or a rejection of democracy, and I’m curious what your reaction is to that. And then Lawrence, just to have you follow up with your thoughts as well.

Madiba K. Dennie:

Definitely to the rejection of Democrats, and I think I would say maybe to rejection of democracy, I’m not all the way sold there yet because I also think that some folks just might not understand the extent to which the conservative legal movement has been preparing to really concentrate authority and power in a single individual and just really weaponize the executive branch. So I’m not prepared to say they’re giving up a democracy itself because they probably still expect to be able to go to the polls and have some sort of say, be able to affect change when they’re so inclined to do so. I’m only going to give that one a maybe. I think some people are open eyes for sure and are well aware. Here’s another thing I’ve been debating about the election. I have so many conflicting thoughts about all this. One is on one hand, Trump and company weren’t exactly subtle, so I’m like people have to know what they’re signing up for. But on the other hand, our information ecosystem is absurd. It’s so siloed and there’s so much disinformation and misinformation. I’ve seen some reporting where people say, oh, I voted for Trump for X thing, that’s patently demonstrably false. And I’m like, oh no, what makes you think of that? That’s why I think I’m not fully prepared to say it was a rejection of democracy itself. Although I am prepared to say rejection of Democrats.

Mitch Winick:

MEbA, I am sensing, first of all, I have the same reaction that I think all three of you have had to the election, but I’m wondering is there some possibility that there is an age difference in response, that it’s strikingly naive to not look at history and see how these type of decisions have destroyed countries and destroyed the types of policies and social beliefs that many of us have? It just strikes me that some of the voting was naive in saying, oh, Trump doesn’t mean it. Oh, it’s not true. When as you’ve said, it wasn’t a lack of information, there was an abundance of information of exactly what he thought. Project 2025, if we think that isn’t the map, we’re kidding ourselves. So I just wonder, is it because grumpy old people like me say, how can you fall for this is a failure to step up and protect democracy?

Lawrence Goldstone:

First of all, you’re right. People might’ve voted for an anti-democratic system, but they didn’t know that. They did not think they were voting to abolish democracy. They thought they were voting for democracy and they should run the show. But if we’re looking for historical parallels, let’s go back to one that really fits in 14 five, Gutenberg brought his 42 line Bible to Frankfurt and it revolutionized printing. They had printing before, but this was printing with movable type. But those were giant books and you can think of those as mainframe computers. And then there was a man at the end in the 1490s am Aldis MIUs who folded the paper three times and got what was called an octavo, which is basically the size of a contemporary hardcover. And all of a sudden printing runs of 1,002 thousand books, the books would go in saddlebags and knowledge spread all over Europe.

And people started learning, and you can think of this as personal computers now. Initially they were taking in information and you can think of that as the early a OL, but then it occurred to some people that if you take it in, you can also put it out. Think of that as the blogosphere podcast. And people like Desa, Darius Erasmus became incredibly popular. And then 15, 17, Martin Luther did his 95 feces a hundred years before he would’ve been burned at the stake, but a printer picked it up, printed 2,500 copies, distributed it all over Europe. And when Charles the V called Luther in to account for his blasphemy, Luther basically had become invulnerable. And from that information revolution, that spread of information led ultimately to the enlightenment and us. So what I see in this election is our inability at the present time to deal with how this information is disseminated, the inability of people to distinguish truth from ridiculous conspiracies and it focuses in on the most vulnerable to disinformation. And I think that’s where we’re at, and it fits in with what everyone said. We are at the point where most people cannot tell the difference between truth and even outrageous lies. They didn’t think they were voting against democracy.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to drill down on that a little bit because it’s that idea of an educated citizenry as a necessity for the maintenance of democracy. And there’s so many quotes historically that connect our democracy and its sustainability to having an educated citizenry. One of the things that is happening at an accelerated pace is the attack on public education in the K through 12 context, and it’s happening at the state level primarily. So this isn’t a federal issue, this isn’t something that is happening. President-elect Trump isn’t going to stop it. He could accelerate it, but he’s not going to stop it. So it’s happening at the state level. Prager U, which is a incredibly, I don’t even want to know what to call it. The videos are just absolutely insane in terms of how they present history are being adopted by K 12 schools as a learning tool. Colleges and universities have educational gag orders placed on them about what can be taught in the classroom regarding history, regarding race, regarding sexuality, and now we’ve got Trump promising a national university that will be free. Now, whether or not Trump University two ever becomes a reality is a different question. But to your point that Republicans are actually good at organizing at the local level, they are attacking one of the primary instances of maintenance of our democracy. How do we counter that go? Anyone? Tell me the answer.

Madiba K. Dennie:

I think you mentioned earlier, school board elections as a one way you can start making that change. And probably also just community organizations doing their own almost sort of alternative programming when you’re confronted with this horrible propaganda in the school system. You mentioned blogs earlier. I think people are just going to have to try do whatever they can to otherwise disseminate information and it’s not necessarily an easy task. We had Elon Musk by Twitter and just taking away overnight this what was a useful resource. We’re also seeing people say we organize before Twitter. We can organize after Twitter too. We can use other social media platforms. We can do stuff offline. So I think just trying to find ways to get information out to people. One thing I’ve had on my mind a little bit sort of related to that, I’ve seen folks discussing the role of the sort of manosphere in our political ecosystem, like your Joe Rogan type things where it’s like guys broing out and then also doing lots of misinformation. So what are some avenues for confronting something like that? Do we find some other sort of infotainment for people that we can create? I’m not sure yet, but I think these are things we need to think about for sure, and sort of like mass education and outreach.

Mitch Winick:

And Larry, as you’re going to talk about some of creating schools, let me just ask this in the context of what Madiba just said. If one of the stated almost guaranteed outcomes of the Trump election and K 12 education is to pursue what they call school choice, which is to then give all funding at the local level to the parents to spend as they like not on public schools, is that the type of thing that Democrats should say, wait a minute, this is a gift. We were fearful of the death of public schools, but maybe they’re handing us the money. Is that possible?

Lawrence Goldstone:

Yes. It’s interesting that the Republican push has been to take power away from the federal government and give it back to the states. Well, there are some states that aren’t wonderful and won’t handle the money well, but then there are states who should say, okay, you’ve got to adapt. You can’t demand that the rules of the game change so you can play comfortably. The rules of the game have changed and it is extremely uncomfortable and we must, the MEbA is dead, right? You have to find ways through, but we must be creative. You have to stop going, oh, it’s terrible. They did it and they did it effectively and we need to do it and do it effectively.

Mitch Winick:

Tell us the story about your friend’s opening schools.

Lawrence Goldstone:

I have a friend who’s a very, who’s a well-known artist and sculptor, and he’s a pilot and he was flying from New York to Miami and heard about the earthquake in Haiti. He wanted to see if he could help. So instead of going to Miami, this is a single engine Cessna. So he flies to Haiti, lands basically on the dirt, and he sees that there is this incredible need for medical supplies. So he spends the next couple of weeks shuttling back and forth bringing medical supplies. They were doing amputations without anesthesia, and then he decided that what he would do is try to get money to build a school in a rural area of Haiti. You can’t just educate the kids so poor. You have to clothe them, you have to feed them, you have to supply all sorts of other services. And he called it wings over Haiti. They built one school. It was incredibly successful, and now they built a second school that got people like Jamy Diamond and Donna, Karen, Kathleen Parker and the Washington Post wrote it up. The second school just graduated its first kindergarten class. Now, did he change Haiti? No, he didn’t. But one of those students that went to those schools might change Haiti. This epitomizes the approach when you look and you go, it’s not glamorous, but I can make a change here and start with the here

Mitch Winick:

Madiba. Let me go back to what you’ve written about because a lot of your focus has been how at risk populations suffer under these transitions. I get it. Your optimism warms my heart. Call to action, start small, do one right thing, save one. But it’s been decades that many of us have been involved in change to move entire communities up, and I have a hard time seeing where entire communities are not going to be disenfranchised in the near term. So we just suck it up and say that’s the price we pay to get to the future. I’m not sure what to say about it, but that’s what is most hurtful to me at the moment.

Madiba K. Dennie:

No, I understand that one is I definitely refuse to suck it up. So as soon as we say it’s over, then it is they need to have folks pushing back. And you’re not wrong that we’re about to see some really tough consequences for people in terms of disenfranchisement and also just in terms of people’s material realities. Folks’ lives are going to get harder what they’re exposed to in school, like the safety of their food, the safety of their air and water, whether they can access reproductive healthcare. There’s all sorts of really rough stuff that’s about to happen.

Mitch Winick:

Elimination of headstart, which has been a right wing goal that will now happen with the stroke of a pen.

Jackie Gardina:

Yeah, well, the deportation of millions and millions of people, or at least the detention of millions and millions of people.

Madiba K. Dennie:

But I think this may very well be naive as I’m desperate to find something since I am not prepared to accept the state of things. That’s part of where some creative resistance comes in, even potentially a little bit dangerous resistance, whether fusing to follow some of the executive branches, future edicts or court decisions like upholding them or people doing community defense when ice comes to take away their neighbor to blockade the door. I think that there are a lot of things that are perhaps risky. It’s going to be asking a lot of people, but as I think Lawrence’s story about his friend in Haiti sort of reminding me of great strides I’ve seen in history, I feel like are so often prompted by at least one person seeing something and saying, absolutely not. I can do something. And I feel like everyone has something they can do and that when we all do something, it helps collectively move us along.

Lawrence Goldstone:

I agree totally. And let’s not forget the tens of millions of people who are available to help do something. There are tens of millions of people. Medina is exactly right. What can each person do? How do we organize? How do we do it? What small or maybe even a larger community can we impact with education, with support, with job programs? And yes, John Lewis kind of resistance.

Madiba K. Dennie:

I was thinking about what you were saying, Lawrence, about the extent to which a lot of people just don’t know how the federal government does benefit them and serve their interests and how the Democratic party in particular has done these things for them. And I think that’s something that the party infrastructure definitely needs to improve at is messaging and branding and letting people know that they’re doing these things for them.

Lawrence Goldstone:

It really disturbs me that so many Democrats are just picking at each other. Oh, if Biden had dropped out earlier, there would’ve been a primary process, a different nominee. Forget it in this one, in my opinion, no Democrat could have won. And then the Democrats have to ask themselves and say, why not? Part of it is ignorance of the electorate. Part of it is a lack of education. Part of it is greed, part of it is entitlement. There’s lots of parts, but in order to build back up, you have to be honest about why you lost.

Mitch Winick:

Let me ask one question about this. We’ve talked a lot about the political parties and strengths and failures of how the two political parties went through this last cycle, but we’ve also talked about actions and initiatives that have nothing to do with politics that literally focus on, as you’ve said, small ball, think small. What can we do opening a school that wasn’t a democratic school or a Republican school that was an individual’s initiative? What happens if there are many of us who say the political system really is broken? I think I will just go apolitical. I will do exactly what the two of you have said. I’m going to go open a school down the street or go read in classrooms or fill in the blank of the thousands of needy things related to food, education, healthcare, social justice that are needed. First of all, part of what we just said today is that’s not such a bad idea. Good things will come of it, but that could bode a very different history of the Democratic party as the organizing force of some of these things.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to push back for a moment because Democrats are really good at governance. When you look at what’s been accomplished over the last four years, there’s been a lot that’s been accomplished on the governance side. So when we say they’re broken, I want to make sure that we’re clear about what it is we might be talking about. Is it that they aren’t playing the same game as the Republicans and therefore losing at the game that’s being played, but in terms of policies and governance, I don’t see them as broken. Do I wish they’d do better? In some areas, absolutely. But have they governed effectively? Yeah. And there’s data to back that up on the economy, on inflation, on the growth of manufacturing, on any number of areas that were not effectively done by the Republicans when they were in power. So when we say that the Democratic party is broken, what exactly are we saying?

Lawrence Goldstone:

I think the Biden presidency was one of the most successful terms that I have in my lifetime. I can’t think of another term where they came out of this incredible crisis, grew the country, did not have a recession, that every economist predicted the market grew, brought the manufacturing back, all the things Trump was supposed to do. The one thing I would’ve changed is when they said to Kamal Harris, well, what were you doing for the last three and a half years? I would’ve said, making progress. The first thing we had to do was get people back to work. Yes, that was going to make prices go up, and now we’re dealing with that. Now, would it have made a difference? I don’t know. But yes, the Democratic Party has been much more effective at governance than you have to ask yourself, how come they lost?

And that’s where they’re broken. They’re not broken in policy. They’re not broken in their vision for the country. They’re not broken in their desire to expand. What started as an extremely limited democracy, let us not forget that in a country of 3 million people in 1788, only 42,000 voted for president. This was not a country founded as a democracy. Hamilton Madison did not want to expand. Adams did not want to expand the right to vote, and we have done that. But how do we let the people know, Hey, we are the people who did it for you. Now, one of the ways might be the Republicans might, as Mitch said, might do us a big favor and implement a lot of policies where people go, oh, what happened to Dr. Singh, the immigrant from India who is in the rural hospital? These rural hospitals rely on immigrant doctors. Oh, I’m sorry, he’s not here anymore. Well, who do we have now? Well, you have Becky, the nurse. These kinds of personal impacts in the areas that are unaware of how much democratic policies help them, that’s not going to hurt.

Madiba K. Dennie:

I want to add thinking about when we say the Democratic Party is broken, what do we mean? I think definitely advertising wins is part of it. Sure. But I also want to acknowledge that even though democratic policies are obviously better for most of the public, unless you’re an oligarch, there are still a lot of people who still feel like they’re struggling to make ends meet who still don’t know how they’re going to pay the next light bill. And so for those people, I think they would say, this isn’t enough. Even though it’s better, it’s still not enough. And so I think that’s something democratic party needs to address is going further, trying to do more for people, swinging for defenses and to actually really make a difference for folks. And I think another significant issue is the Democrats have said how the democracy was on the ballot and are saying, looking at the threat of authoritarianism and fascism.

But then at the same time, we see them saying how valuable bipartisanship is. And I’m like, I don’t want to be bipartisan with a fascist. What are you talking about? And so it’s like, well, did you mean when you said they were a fascist? Because if so, why are you doing this? And if you didn’t, why are you lying? I think that they really need to think about some of that messaging and really think about the threats that were up against. Because I think that Democrats have really been struggling to meet the moment. I mean, there is no reason why Trump still having not even gone to trial in some of the cases on his numerous offenses that we all saw play out in public because some Democratic leaders were hemming and hawing about whether they should do something about it. Maybe he’ll just go away on his own and now they’re letting an authoritarian who has violated his constitutional oath to stumble right back into the lighthouse. I think that’s a sign of brokenness that you couldn’t put up a good fight against that. That’s deeply disturbing. So I think actually meeting people’s needs, doing more for folks, prioritizing the needs of regular people than treating these threats seriously. I think those are two things I would really want to see from the Democratic party.

Lawrence Goldstone:

I would disagree with some of that. I think the Democrats were extremely successful at initiating programs that benefited ordinary people. What they were not successful in doing is letting the people realize that they had done it for them. And in terms of not making ends meet totally right, but then you have to say, at what point do people have to accept they’re not always going to get everything they want all the time? Because it’s not simply that these people couldn’t afford everything they wanted to afford, and those complaints were absolutely legitimate, and it was a post pandemic period. They chose a party to right those perceived wrongs that deals with their class of people with contempt. Trump has a history of stiffing contractors, all working class people. There were people in New York, electricians and plumbers that would not work for him unless they were paid up front.

His lawyers won’t work for him unless they’re paid up front. The of the problem is not simply that Democrats were not as effective as they might have been in letting people know about the Chips Act and all of these of these other plans. It is that the people chose the party who merely made ridiculous broad promises who have a history of opposing every one of these programs that benefits. So again, we’re back to are they broken in governance? No. Are they broken in messaging? Yes. And I would go further than that and say they’re broken and organizing because you can’t message from the top. You can’t say, I’m going to have a news conference. And now everybody’s going to know what the Democratic Party stands for. You’ve got to organize. We’re back to this again. We’ve got to organize locally. You’ve got to start programs locally. You’ve got to initiate it, and you’ve got to let people know when their lives improve a little bit where it came from.

Mitch Winick:

Thank you. I didn’t expect us to solve either our emotional, social, or political concerns of the moment, but as we did anticipate the deep thinking the both of you have done both in your writing and in your presentation of these ideas is helpful because we’ve got a lot of thinking to do and a lot of planning to do, and you’ve given us some guidelines of positive things to think about.

Jackie Gardina:

Me, diva and Lawrence, thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything with us.

Lawrence Goldstone:

This was really fun, and I hope we can do some good.

Madiba K. Dennie:

Thanks for having us on you guys.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch, when we first imagined this episode, as I said at the beginning, it was with a potentially very different outcome and a very different discussion, and it’s just a week out from the election, and I’m still incredibly worried, and probably more so now when I hear about some of the proposed nominees to cabinet positions as well as some of the other pieces that are coming out in the news, whether or not they come to fruition. But I think something that left me with hope that interestingly both Madiba and Larry emphasized, is that idea of organizing at the local level. I think we pay so much attention every four years to what’s happening at the presidential election that what’s been lost is the local process, the local organizing, and it actually brings me to a place of hope that I can have an effect or an impact on the future by paying attention to what’s happening locally in a much more deliberate and sustained way.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, you and I have always tried to have our program focus on constitutional law decisions by the courts. I think this may be the first program we’ve ever really focus on political parties and the impact that they may be having in what’s going on with the rule of law and the future of the Supreme Court. And so although it may come across as this was a political discussion, I think we fundamentally believe that that’s part and parcel of how do you understand our constitutional rights and what is the future of democracy. But what I took from this conversation is the same thing that you did, and that’s one of the reasons I asked whether the goal for many of us is to think local, think small, think personal. What can we do? We’ve talked about many large concepts on SideBar over the last two years. Things like the role of the Constitution and where are we on women’s rights and diversity and voting rights. This is really more of a conversation of where are we in the level of our humanity and what is it that we can do both Larry and Madiba and you and I believe that is still a very viable thing we should be doing, we should be carrying about, and maybe some of the larger issues we’ll take a little longer to work out.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.

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