How America's Government Teacher Proves Doers Beat Critics

29:24And without giving away everything that happens in the book, she's eventually fired from her job as a teacher and goes on to start teaching adults. And some of the adults she teaches become the heroes of the civil rights movement. She teaches John Lewis. She teaches Rosa Parks. And had she not continued doing the next needed thing, had she just been like, you know, know what? It's time to just sit home and bake brownies. She would not be the mother of the civil rights movement. But when she gets to the end of her life and people say, what have you learned? She doesn't say, I've learned that all people who look like this are my enemies or all people who think this way are my enemies.

30:05She says, I've learned that I can work with my enemies because they might have a change of heart at any moment. And how would your enemies ever have a change of heart if you are not there to turn the light on for them? The idea that you can accomplish things, especially politically, on your own is not really well supported in a complex democracy like the United States. You have to have people to cooperate with. And both Norm and Danny are great examples of being able to build those kinds of coalitions where they got people to cooperate with them who maybe wouldn't cooperate with them on other things.

30:48We might not agree over here, but we can agree on this thing. And if we want to do things that are meaningful for our neighbors, meaningful for the country, we have to be willing to work together in every way that we can, even if it doesn't mean that we agree on everything. Is there a line? is there a point too far are you saying that you're going to conceive of how you can work with steven miller and you have to go there guy why steven miller but i'm just teasing go ahead well i mean you don't love your enemies i don't like it i don't want to do that my enemies are weird and gross as we've established um okay here's what i would say you are not required to light yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

31:37And working with your enemies doesn't mean let murderers move into your house. It doesn't mean be best friends with them and let them have access to all of your innermost thoughts and feelings. What it does mean is for the good of all, being willing to work with people with whom you disagree for the betterment of others, not for your own benefit, not for your own, you know, like, well, I wanted a million dollars, so I cooperated with Stephen Miller, not I really wanted to get some paved roads, so I went ahead and cooperated with Hitler. That's obviously a very far extreme example. Most Americans do not have proclivities towards murderous dictators.

32:24So I do think there are certainly exceptions to this concept. Some people are just better off in prison, right? Like, I don't need to make public policy with you. You should go to jail. But if we're talking about the concept that's found in the preamble to the Constitution, which is that America at her best is just peaceful, good, and free, that we are working for the common good, then that sometimes means working with people with whom you have significant disagreement. Okay. But don't ask me to work with Stephen Miller.

33:00I'm just teasing. He's not going to call me. Trust me. I'm looking forward to seeing your Instagram photo, the two of you. You mean Steve. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Generative AI. Is it time for a new constitution? Should we be working on constitution 2.0? I don't know that it's necessary to scrap the Constitution altogether. I think the basic concepts of three separate co-equal branches of government that check and balance each other, that separate powers, I think those are good concepts to understand and to live by. Those are things that are present in most democracies around the world. I do think, however, it is definitely time to update the Constitution.

33:45We have not updated the Constitution since the 90s, and we have not made really sizable, meaningful, big changes to the Constitution in many, many, many decades. And there's a lot of evidence that the framers of the Constitution fully intended for us to go in and update the document as frequently as was needed. They put two different ways of how to update it in the document itself. If you guys need to change anything, here's one way you can do it, here's another way you can do it. They fully anticipated that they could not know everything that would happen in the future and that people would need to make changes.

34:22So I absolutely think it is time to update the Constitution. I have a running list in my mind of ways in which I would like to update the Constitution if it were ever up to me, which it's not. But if it ever were, I already have ideas of some of the things that I'd like to do. Well, give us some of those ideas. Well, a lot of my big ideas about updates to the Constitution involve changes to our electoral system. The current version that we have landed at is nothing like what was envisioned by the framers. And I'm not saying the framers, we have to adhere to what they were saying. I'm just saying we're not anywhere close to what they were envisioning.

35:02A lot of our ideas have proven to be detrimental for the country as a whole. Most people don't agree with them. And the few things that I really think are important to change is the way that money is involved in politics. I don't think billionaires should be able to essentially buy elections. and most Americans don't either. 80 % of Americans don't think billionaires should be able to buy elections. They don't want to be controlled by a bunch of billionaire oligarchs. They want to have their own voices matter more and to not feel like nobody ever listens to me because I don't have billions of dollars.

35:38So I do think we need to reform campaign finance. We need to radically change how elections are run in the United States in the sense of how they're funded. We should, this is true of almost every other democracy, have a very compressed election cycle. The reason it costs a billion dollars to run for president, that is how much each party has spent over the last two election cycles, a billion dollars each time. Ridiculous waste of money. The reason it takes that amount of money is because of how the election system is set up. If we changed it, we could have elections in six weeks. It would not cost billions of dollars.

36:18Voters would probably be better engaged. You can engage with something for six weeks much more easily than you can engage with it for two years, right? The fatigue is real. And other ideas that I have for changing the election system in the United States involves having a designated national primary election day as opposed to allowing primary elections to just be piecemealed around the entire country. Why can't we have one presidential primary where everybody gets to vote on who they want the candidates to be instead of letting a couple of states like Iowa and New Hampshire essentially dictate who the candidates are going to be for the rest of us?

36:56that's not fair to people who live in, say, Connecticut, who have very late elections in the election cycle. And by the time they get to vote on something, this is true of a friend who lives in South Dakota as well. By the time the South Dakota presidential primaries come around, there is almost always nobody to vote for. You're basically just going and checking a box for the one candidate that is left. Why should the people of South Dakota or Connecticut have absolutely no say in who the candidates are. If we change how candidates are selected, we will change governing behavior. And if we remove the money piece from the equation, we will change governing behavior.

37:37They will not be beholden to billionaires and corporate special interests. They will care more about their constituencies than about the people with deep pockets. So I could keep going. This is a topic I obviously care about, but those are just like a couple of my ideas off the top. But you did not mention Electoral College. Well, I think that's part of it too. I think we need to get rid of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is preventing the proliferation of additional political parties. The healthiest democracies have between four and nine political parties. That is where the most people feel well-represented by their government.

38:15Too many people today do not feel well-represented. A great example of this are Catholics. Catholics have strong social justice teachings as part of their church beliefs. They really believe in helping the poor, helping elderly, the sick, etc. But they are also strongly pro-life. And they would say they're pro-life from womb to tomb. They don't believe in abortion. They don't believe in the death penalty. And neither party represents that position. And so consequently, you have some American Catholics voting Democrat and some voting Republican. If you are a white Catholic, you're more likely to vote Republican.

38:51If you're a Catholic of color, you're more likely to vote Democrat. There is no candidate that represents that viewpoint of millions. And the two-party system creates this us versus them binary that eliminates the cooperation that is present in other healthy democracies amongst parties where you have to work with people to get something done. So the Electoral College winner-takes-all system. First of all, the framers never intended for it to be winner-take-all. It was never intended for it to be winner-take-all. And for the first four to five decades of the United States, it was not winner-take-all.

39:30The idea that whoever wins the popular vote in a state gets all of that state's electoral votes, that is not how it was designed to work, and that's not how it worked at the beginning. It only started working that way as states decided that they could consolidate their own political power if they all conspired to vote the same. I would absolutely eliminate the Electoral College as we know it. There is no reason that we should not have one person, one vote. There's no reason for that, in my opinion. Now, it seems to me that whether you're a Democrat or Republican, whenever you hear a proposal like that, you're not thinking about the big picture of democracy and one person, one vote and all that.

40:10You're thinking, does this give me an advantage or a disadvantage? I mean, they cannot get past that. How do we get past that? that yeah, no, no. If you're a Republican, you say we cannot go to a pure popular vote because our candidate didn't win the most popular votes in the last few elections. We need to stick with the electoral college system. How are you ever going to change that? Well, the electoral college is the ultimate DEI, isn't it? We'll just start calling it election DEI. That it's giving unfair what they perceive as unfair advantages to states that have not earned them. That's essentially what's happening.

40:53We have states like Wyoming that have fewer than a million people who have an outsized amount of political power in comparison to states like California that have obviously like 37 million people. So how we will change it is by convincing enough people that they are not being well represented by government and that our current zero sum game is not going to yield different results 20 years from now than it is in 2026 or 2028. That if we are going to continue to keep doing what we're doing, we're going to continue getting the same results. Americans have done tougher things before. I know it seems like how will we ever change it?

41:39We spent hundreds of years enslaving Africans. We spent hundreds of years telling women that they were men's property and had no right to own anything on their own and no right to vote. America can change for the better. We can make progress. We have to believe it's true. Up next on Remarkable People. If that means that Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law, then When Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law. And the same should be said of Matt Gaetz. If Matt Gaetz commits a crime, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men.

42:19Then he should go to jail.

42:25Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People. with Guy Kawasaki. You mentioned the influence of money on elections, and it seems to me that really kind of kicked off lately with a Supreme Court decision, right? Where it basically made it so that corporations have a vote. Now you say in your book that your least favorite Supreme Court decision was Dred Scott. Is that still true? Have we made even worse Supreme Court decisions since you wrote the book like, you know, a president can do anything?

43:17Yeah, I still have to say that Dred Scott is still the worst Supreme Court decision because it has to do with the fundamental humanity of people. But do I think the notion, the Supreme Court decision that presidents have absolute immunity over all things that are not part of their presidential duty, is that a dangerous idea? I absolutely think it is. I absolutely think it is. But Dred Scott was really applied to the fundamental humanity of today millions and millions of Americans. So it still gets my vote as the worst Supreme Court decision ever. But the second one. But the second one, which one is the second worst?

44:01Gosh, there were some pretty bad decisions surrounding the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, where they said that that was perfectly permissible to go ahead and incarcerate US citizens, including children who'd been accused of no crime and no wrongdoing. And then they, of course, only recently overturned in sort of a side note of a different decision, only recently acknowledged the ridiculousness of that decision. So to me, when we're talking about casting entire groups of people based on ethnicity or race as less than, those are some of our most dangerous ideas, because that is a path to dehumanization.

44:49And if you can dehumanize somebody, you can convince people to do anything. If this group of people over here is not fully human in your eyes, you can convince people to treat them abhorrently, which is exactly what happened throughout the hundreds of years of American history when we enslaved people. That's what we did to Native Americans. That's what we did to Japanese Americans. That's what Hitler did to Jews in Germany. I could continue. But that posture of dehumanization is always a dangerous one. And don't you think we're well down that path right now with Alligator Alcatraz? What's the difference between that and Manzanar?

45:26I've been to Manzanar. Manzanar is not as bad as the videos of Alligator. I can't even say that. Alcatraz, yeah. I absolutely do think that we are heading down that path. I absolutely do. I recently wrote a social media post about this exact topic. in which I had run across an influencer who has 5 million followers on YouTube and millions of followers on Facebook. And he had put up a post that said the first van load of prisoners has arrived to Alligator Alcatraz. And he showed a picture of the van. And then he wrote into my veins, meaning like, yes, like that's like the posture of what he was doing.

46:07And the responses to that post, but when I came across it not long ago, there were over 22 ,000 responses to that post. And nearly every single one said such horrific dehumanizing things about the people who were being imprisoned in Alligator Alcatraz. This is not about immigration, actually. What I'm talking about right now is not should we have immigration enforcement. It's not do some people need to be deported. What I'm talking about is the unmitigated dehumanization of people who are being imprisoned in these facilities. They were saying things like, and I absolutely do not endorse these ideas, this is just an example, be sure to throw some rice and beans in the water because the alligators like Mexican food.

46:54That's just one example of the tens of thousands of comments. So I took a few screenshots and posted this on my social media so people could see, number one, I'm not making this up. Number two, these are not isolated incidents of a handful of bad actors. These are thousands and thousands of comments that are all saying very similar things. And that number three, if they can convince you to get on board with dehumanizing people, they can convince you of anything. Every atrocity in human history has begun with dehumanization. It's a dangerous road to be on. It absolutely is. And some of us are on it right now.

47:32And you know that many of those people who posted those comments identify as Christians. Yes, they sure do. I posted this too. This horrible comment came from a woman whose profile picture says, daughter of the king. Is that how you want to represent your church? Is that how you want to represent yourself as a follower of Christ? You want people to believe that this is how the followers of Christ think of other human beings. I said this, some of y 'all need to come get your friends. Some of y 'all need to come get your friends from church and be like, I don't know what you're doing, but this ain't it.

48:08This is not it. And I don't want anyone listening to this to think that I am anti-Christian. That is not the point that I'm trying to make at all. I'm saying there's a big dichotomy between the teachings of their faith and the way they are conducting themselves in public while also putting bible verses in their bios that's happening so can i ask you this that you hold yourself out as non-partisan now it seems to me that today many people define non-partisan as they agree with what i say and the moment you disagree you are no longer nonpartisan it is not possible to be non-partisan and disagree with me now someone listening to this podcast is gonna say she is a die hard hardcore liberal dei supporting lg yeah just everything so so what's your response to that if you said that vaccines prevent measles someone's gonna say you're not non-partisan that's true how do you prove you're non-partisan when you say something that other people disagree with?

49:21Yeah, I love that question. Because people believe now that something's true if I agree with it. And if I disagree, it's a lie. That's the standard that many people operate from. To me, I am operating from a perspective of, I care more about the principles of democracy than I do about any party allegiance or allegiance to any leader. I do not belong to a political party. I will call out people from both sides of the aisle who are not upholding the principles of democracy. If that means that Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law, then Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law.

50:09And the same should be said of Matt Gaetz. If Matt Gaetz commits a crime, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men, then he should go to jail. So to me, this is not about, I do not care actually in the slightest about political parties. I think in many ways, the current two-party system we have is very damaging to the American psyche. It really does create this good versus evil, us versus them that is very, very difficult to engage and any kind of constructive conversations with. So again, I don't care about allegiance to a person or party. And that's what I mean by nonpartisan. I don't work for some party that pays me to do things.

50:49I don't advocate for all members of this party. I'm not going to these party events. I don't care about your parties. I care about the big picture principles of democracy. And there are people on both sides of the aisle who also care about that. I recently had the chance to interview Condoleezza Rice, who was George W. Bush's Secretary of State National Security Advisor, now directs an institute at Stanford. Lifelong conservative Republican, who I firmly believe cares about the principles of democracy. I firmly believe that she does. you might not agree with all of her ideas, but the two of you can probably get together and say, the right way to settle our disagreements is through the democratic process.

51:37She's a very interesting person. I interviewed her once and she grew up in, what's your call? In Birmingham. Yeah, in Birmingham. She grew up in segregated Alabama. Yes. Yeah. With the German shepherds and the water hoses and all that. Yeah. She told me something very, very interesting I've kept in my mind till this day, which is you cannot believe you're a victim because if you believe you're a victim, that gives you the victim mindset and you will not, you know, do what you have to do. You will not help other people because you believe you're a victim. Although some people legitimately are victims.

52:16She was warning against adopting the victim sort of mindset. I hear exactly what she's saying. Also, one of the things she said to me that was one of my takeaways is that before somebody wants to change something, they should really take the time to understand it. And this is a great example of the fight that's happening with the Department of Education, where there's a current push to sort of fire everybody that works the Department of Education and dismantle it. And yet, I recently encountered this, that if you ask people who want to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, if you ask them, what does the Department of Education do?

52:55They cannot tell you. They cannot tell you. They think that it sets curriculum, that it dictates to states what they have to teach. They truly do not understand what the Department of Education does. Perhaps, like Condoleezza Rice suggests, we should take the time to fully understand something before we seek to change it so that we don't make grievous errors in our efforts. If I'm a surgeon, I should fully understand how the heart works before I take a scalpel to it. Just so people understand this, the other McMahon family is no relation whatsoever, right? No relation to Linda, the current secretary of education.

53:37Unlike Linda, I actually have classroom experience. And you probably don't like professional wrestling. And I'm not a professional wrestler. Also, I understand what the Department of Education does. She could not tell an interviewer what IDEA is, which is a very important federal education law about why we have to educate students with disabilities. Well, you know, there are other people who believe that the writ of habeas corpus is the ability of the president to remove anybody from the country. That's kind of a problem, too. That's a problem. I concur, Guy. I only went to law school for one week, but I know what the writ of habeas corpus is.

54:22So listen, you obviously are outspoken. Can you talk about the toll that it takes upon a person to be as outspoken as you? It actually is really hard sometimes. It actually really is. It's hard to do what you believe is the right thing sometimes. There are times that I end up on the wrong side of TikTok, as they say, or the wrong side of Instagram, where people are taking my videos or my comments and they're making fun of me and they send hundreds or thousands of people my way to send me terrible messages and they tell me to kill myself and they are threatened to kill me and all these kinds of things happen.

55:02One of the big challenges right now is actual personal security, like with what happened with the lawmakers in the state of Minnesota, where a man knocks on their door pretending to be a police officer and shoots them, assassinates one woman and her husband and tries to assassinate another man and his wife. And it came out later that he had a list of more than 70 people. And he's from Minnesota, where I am from. I was on vacation when this whole thing went down. But one of the first thoughts that I had after hearing this story was, I could be on that list. I could be on that list. I would guess that more people in the state of Minnesota know who I am than knows who Melissa Hortman is.

55:44I am not saying that I'm not inflating my own importance. She actually is a lawmaker. She actually does important things or did important things in the state of Minnesota, but she's just not on the internet making a household name of herself. She was doing the real work of governing. So it did not seem far-fetched that I could be on his list. And I don't know if I am law enforcement never contacted me to say you were on the list. Fortunately, he was arrested and is probably going to go to jail for the rest of his life. But that's a very real, especially in today's political moment, it's a very real concern for people in my line of work.

56:23It's not just the mental health aspect of people tell you to kill yourself all the time. It's not just the hate that you get. There's also a growing personal safety concern. And that also has a mental health component as well. And how do you deal with this? Because I cannot believe that Heather Cox Richardson doesn't think like this too. If I were her, if I were you, if I were, you know, many people like this, it's got to be top of mind. Yeah, I haven't asked Heather about it in a long time. But I know Heather is like really good friends with Joanne Freeman, who is also a political historian. And she actually has written a book called The Field of Blood, Joanne Friedman has.

57:06Heather and Joanne used to have a podcast together. And The Field of Blood is about political violence in the United States Congress. So they are both very, very, as political historians, well-versed with our country's proclivity towards political violence. And I don't know how she's dealing with it. I honestly don't know. But I know that she lives in the Northwoods like I do. I live on a dirt road in a rural area. I know she lives in the rural Northwoods as well. That hasn't stopped people from coming to my house though. That hasn't stopped people from showing up at my office. And when you do public appearances, that's also like I have to have personal security for public appearances and venue security for public appearances just because you don't know.

57:56I recently won a First Amendment award from the Freedom Forum, and we had to have a whole security meeting about what are we going to do to make sure this event is not disrupted by somebody, and we had to have metal detectors. It's a very real concern, and it weighs on you. Wow. Okay, my last question for you. Let's suppose that you can go back in time and you can go back and you're with governor morris and you're with the people drafting the constitution and you go back and you say listen i'm from 2025 let me give you boys some advice here about how you should write the constitution so it doesn't screw everything up two or three hundred years from now what advice would you give those people about the constitution 1.0.

58:49Listen here, gentlemen. I got some thoughts. I got some thoughts for you. The first thing is that Gouverneur Morris was a very strong advocate against enslavement. He did not believe in slavery. And there's been much that has been made about like, what should the framers have done when they could not agree on this issue? But if I could go back in time and change their minds about anything. I would have to change their mind about the role of women and the role of minority groups in the United States, Native Americans, African Americans, and all other minority groups who have been systematically and legally discriminated against and excluded.

59:32If I could change their minds about one thing, that would be it because we have robbed ourselves of hundreds of years of important thought and progress and inventions and people who have been intentionally excluded from the conversation. If you look at, say, the scientific advancements of women in the subject of physics at the early part of the 20th century, specifically in Germany, where there were not as many discriminatory policies against women, the scientific contributions of women to physics are incredible. And we have robbed ourselves of hundreds of years of the participation of women and people of color.

1:00:21And we don't even necessarily know everything that we've missed out on. Okay. I wish it were possible for you to go back in time. Yeah, same guy. We'd be a better country today. I can promise you that. We would be a better country today if we had not chosen to codify into law our systematic exclusion and discrimination of certain groups of people. We would be better off today. Well, you know that there are probably people out here listening and they're saying, well, but you know, because I know you address this in your book where they're saying to themselves, we banned slavery before anybody else.

1:01:00We took the high road. And as you say, well, maybe you can explain why that's total bullshit. It is. Somebody made that up as a talking point of like, well, we abandoned slavery way before Afghanistan, as though that is like some great thing to pat ourselves on the back for. The United States was actually among the last of the Western world to ban chattel slavery. We were among the last, not the first. So whoever is parroting this talking point, look with them on suspicion. They are either not informed, they're intentionally lying to you about what real history is. But the concept of like states' rights has always been one that has been used as a tool of discrimination.

1:01:46There are times where things do belong in the hands of locals. What people need to educate children in inner city Los Angeles is different than what people need to educate children in rural Iowa. It's very obvious that these are not the same groups and we need local control over these kinds of things. So there are aspects of government that should belong in local hands. But throughout the entirety of US history, over and over and over again, the state's rights argument has been used to enact discrimination. What exactly do you want the right to do? Especially if you're thinking about in the early part of the United States, what is it that the Southern states want the right to do?

1:02:33Enslaved people. That's what they want the right to do. And our acquiescence to the idea of states should be able to choose for themselves, how they want to conduct all aspects of their governance, it has led to the systematic legal discrimination against many millions of people. Well, if you think about it, Roe versus Wade reversal was a reversion to state, like, let every state decide. It is. And I understand that abortion is not equivalent to enslavement. I'm not going to make an equivalency argument, but it is the same kind of example of states to be able to decide for themselves what they want to do.

1:03:17It is a slippery slope that we have to contend with. Does that mean that states can now ban interracial marriage? Can states now make it so that only children of certain colors are allowed to be educated? That's what happened in the 1950s in Prince Edward County, Virginia. They just decided we're not going to educate black children. We're going to give tuition vouchers to private schools for white children and black children get nothing. That's what happened. So I don't know that there's a really strong, compelling case when it comes to civil rights issues, not about which roads should get paved or true local issues.

1:03:54But when it comes to civil rights, we should all have equal protection under the law. That's in the Constitution. And a child from Alabama should have the same equal protection as a child from New York. I think that is a perfect way to end this episode of Remarkable People. We're in one hour, 11 minutes and 31 seconds into this. And I actually have a lot of other questions I would want to ask you, but I think less is more. I just had a guest on from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and we were discussing less is more. And so we're going to go with the less is more theory. You'll accept it and I'll be back.

1:04:39Yeah. Anytime. We could have a weekly podcast with you, Sharon. Now that I learned how to pronounce your name, I mean, I'm good to go. That's right. I'm good to go. That's right. You're all set. That's right, guys. All righty. And I have a friend in Minnesota. I hope you know. Do you know Andrew Zimmern at all? Yes. I don't know him personally, but I know who he is. Of course. Yes. If you ever want an introduction to Andrew Zimmern, he's a fantastic person. Certainly very well known in a food scene in Minnesota. Yeah. I will tell you a funny story about Andrew Zimmern, which is, you know, basically he really became famous by eating bizarre foods, right?

1:05:19All over the world. Salted shark and I don't know, teriyaki guinea pigs and whatever. And since you have some clear fascination with Hawaii, I'll tell you, I said, Andrew, is there anything you will not eat? And he said, spam. And I told him, I'm from Hawaii. Spam is a delicacy, Andrew. You're killing me. Spam is also made in Minnesota. Like the spam, one of the spam factories is in Minnesota. Oh, that's better than lute fish or whatever that is. That is true. Take spam any day. all right Sharon we're gonna let you go thank you very much let me thank the remarkable people team which is of course Madison Neismar co-producer with Jeff C Shannon Hernandez sound design Tessa Neismar researcher and thank you so much and be sure to check out her book I mean And just give us a 30-second plug for your book, because I found that it's 12-plus people who are small and mighty.

1:06:27Yeah, the small and the mighty are stories of people who did not begin life from a station of power and privilege, but who nevertheless managed to change the course of American history in really unexpected and, in many cases, delightful ways. This is Remarkable People.