WEBVTT 1 00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:07.000 Welcome to how to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy, but know it needs to change. I'm John. 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:22.000 And I'm Omazine. John, for a few years, you've been talking about citizens, not consumers, collective intelligence and people power. And now you've written something for Harvard. 3 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:51.000 Yeah, I've been at Harvard Kennedy School for the last year as a visiting fellow on the Reimagining Democracy Program. And it's given me the opportunity to put something out into the world, really, with that kind of status and legitimacy and to make this argument about the role of government needing to be more about empowering citizens than delivering services or being a kind of authority. And, yeah, I'm really excited to get into the world and see what you think. 4 00:00:51.000 --> 00:01:14.000 And we have invited our friend Johnny Benson. He's a lecturer of political theory at the University of Manchester, and he's also a member of the Manchester center for Political Theory. Johnny, you spend years thinking about whether democracy can actually be trusted to produce good outcomes, which feels like exactly the right question to have in the room today. 5 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:18.000 It's lovely to be here, and I can't wait to discuss John's ideas. 6 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:30.000 Amazing. And before we get into the ideas, I know you, John, and so unless you don't write anything, unless something is burning, why now? 7 00:01:30.000 --> 00:05:01.000 Well, it actually goes back to the summer of 2024 here in the UK and what people may not remember is there were riots that summer, early in the summer after an attack in Southport, near Liverpool. And straight after those riots, that first round of riots, there was a big community cleanup. And then a few days later, the far right released, I think, leaked on social media a list of 100 places that were going to be attacked. That Islamic cultural centers, refugee processing centers, that kind of thing. And in response to that, almost without any real background organization, in every one of those hundred places, at least 100 people, and sometimes thousands came out pretty much spontaneously to protect them. And there was this huge kind of energy of community that night, and a few of even the front page of the Daily Mail the next day, I've kept it on my phone, was something like community turnout to put an end to far right mob. And I and others were trying to get things going and send messages, try and get messages basically into Keir Starmer's office. Because we were like, the speech that needs to be made tomorrow morning writes itself. Like, if he goes out there and he says, this is who we are. This is what this country's about. We are a nation of neighbors and we can turn this energy of community to work on all of our challenges, on climate, on our health service, on everything we need to work on. This is all of us. And he didn't. Instead, he made a speech the next day that said, basically, police and a strong hand has fixed this. And I was in touch with community organizations all over the country. I know how they felt as a result of that. They felt like their work had been ignored, their energy had been invalidated, really. And I think that that moment, what was behind that, and I'm not blaming Starmer as an individual. I think it's an idea of the role of government in this time that says government should fix things for people. And I think this was a particularly egregious kind of moment of that. But it was saying people have no real role here. It ignored community and the energy of citizens. And I think we're in this moment where actually people want to be involved. There's a deep desire for agency in the face of the challenges of our time. And so many of the stories I've been gathering from around the world, whether it's and that we've been telling on this podcast, you know, the Irish Citizens assembly, which started with citizens coming together to say, we need a different way of having the conversations about our future. Taiwan's Covid response, which they actually crowdsourced and tapped into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone. We've got stories coming up from Melbourne in Australia and Perth and all over the world. There is this different way of approaching the work of government which isn't about delivering for people. It's about unlocking and tapping into the energy of people. And I wanted to use the opportunity of having this status of a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, to speak into the corridors of existing systems of power and say, look, there's something going on here. There's something you can do that could really be transformative. 8 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:27.000 Okay. I mean, I am surprised then that you speak about Doge and that it got something right. We all remember Elon Musk, his chainsaw, the $2 trillion got promised in government and government spendings. But you said that they got something right. What is it? 9 00:05:27.000 --> 00:08:55.000 I mean, I think what they got right was the fact that people are ready for a radical transformation of the role of government. People are ready for something very different in how government operates in relation to society. And so I came across some fascinating research, and I'd love to know what Johnny thinks of this in a moment, maybe. I came across this fascinating research where a team had taken focus groups, research groups, all over the US and they had invited people to bring images that represented the existing role of government and the potential, the ideal role of government to those conversations and talk about them and what they brought to the. In 2024 under the Biden administration. The images they brought were like, really desperate. They were images of people drowning and people walking on a tightrope with no safety net. There was this feeling that government was kind of absent, really, that promises were made that just weren't being fulfilled. And in response to that, what that showed was this deep desire for something different. And I think what Doge did was it spoke into that. It said, we acknowledge that something's broken. That's what it got right. And for too long, we've had this kind of. This choice, I think, between an existing kind of technocracy, really, that says, like, we can fix it, keep calm, carry on, vote for us again, and we'll. We'll eventually get it right. And we haven't acknowledged that people feel deeply abandoned. And Doge came into that. Musk came into that with a kind of screw government like, but. But it came in with a. With a message of fundamental changes needed, and that's what it got right. The thing is, in the event, and the research goes on to show this, that when they, when they, when they went out with these focus groups in 2025, the images people were bringing were of like a boot stamping on people after Doge. After Doge. So there had been a desire for something different, but it wasn't this that people wanted. They wanted something different, but not this. And my favorite part of this research is the images people brought. And this is people across the political spectrum, Republican voters, Democrat voters, when they were asked to bring images that represented their ideal relationship, their ideal role of government, the ideal state of the nation, the images they brought were of rowing crews and orchestras. And they talked about the ideal role of government, being a conductor that would make sure that everybody's contribution could be made to its maximum. And I think what this speaks to is, as you say, the Doge was an act of wanton destruction, ultimately. But I think it's important to acknowledge that there was a hunger for something really different. What we haven't done yet, and I think we've had a kind of failure of imagination so far we haven't seen at a kind of systemic, deliberate, structural scale. Governments step into the opportunity to build. Be that conductor, to tap into the contributions that everyone is capable of, rather than trying and failing actually to be a service provider. 10 00:08:55.000 --> 00:09:23.000 That's a Very fascinating concept, like the failure of imagination. Not in execution, as I hear you speaking, but what does it mean to fail at imagination? Johnny, you study democratic skepticism and Doge was born from a kind of democratic skepticism, the idea that government is broken beyond repair. Is that skepticism ever justified? And does John's diagnosis change anything for you? 11 00:09:23.000 --> 00:11:15.000 Well, what John's diagnosis for me points out quite clearly is that a justified skepticism of government doesn't need to translate into a skepticism about democracy. So governments in the United States, democracies around the world, are facing these incredibly significant challenges and they are not really living up to the promise of addressing those. The significant rises in inequality, climate change, cost of living, AI regulation. Right. We have serious challenges and it's not clear governments are even starting to really get a grip on these. But it's, I think, wrong to then have that translate into a more general skepticism about democracy itself. Right. So for one thing, many non democratic countries are facing the same challenges. And in many cases, these challenges are a lot more serious there than they are in the democratic world. And for another thing, the track record of democracies around the world is the most impressive. Right. Democracies do the best for prosperity. They do the best for basic needs, for education, for the environment. They do the best for the protection of human rights. There's so much to be said in favor of democracy. So the real question, the question that John, I think is tackling in his, in his new worker is how do we change our democratic systems in a way that can make them more effective at addressing these kinds of problems? And I think he's completely right that Doge had the wrong answer to this Doge vision is one which does seem to trade on a skepticism about government to a skepticism about democracy. Let's run government not in a democratic way, but let's run it like a Silicon Valley tech firm. Right? Let's get a big businessman like Musk in the room. He will be able to sort this out. Let's not get democratic debate and discussion in the way cut through that. We can be as efficient as possible in the way that these kind of tech companies are. 12 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:16.000 Right. 13 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:19.000 And that origin story is part of the kind of disaster it went. 14 00:11:19.000 --> 00:11:20.000 Right. 15 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:24.000 The people in the room in Doge did not really understand government or how it worked. 16 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:25.000 Right. 17 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:38.000 You had a number of decisions which just went against what people would really want. Right. So it's seeing that the government skepticism which is completely justified, not translating into a kind of democratic skepticism. 18 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:39.000 Right. 19 00:11:38.000 --> 00:12:08.000 And this kind of approach, I think we've seen in the past. Right. So in the past, it was government failure. The solution was to kind of give it over to the market, reduce the state, let private firms do this. Right. And in the same case with the market solutions. And the DOGE solution is that focus on efficiency. I just make government more efficient, rather than trying to think, well, what are the goals of government? And how do we get the goals of government closer to the goals and aspirations of people? That question is not in either of those kinds of packages. 20 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:24.000 Yeah, so it's this market approach to government. And John, you're proposing something called a Department of Citizen Empowerment instead of doge. We have dos, Right. It's another acronym, another department. How would you convince the skeptic in the room? 21 00:12:24.000 --> 00:16:54.000 Well, I mean, first of all, just to say that the play on the play on the acronym was very deliberate. Right. I spent 10 years working in the advertising industry, so I like to mess with language where I can, but I genuinely believe that, like I say that the thing that DOGE got right was this kind of radical transformation, the idea that something really, really different is needed and wanted by people. And so I think what we can learn from DOGE is the possibility of, of creating transformation units, doing this kind of really radically, all at once, spreading something across government. And so dose Department of Citizen Empowerment, the way what I imagine that to be is teams that would have a kind of a really open remit to work horizontally across government departments, drawing on a load of the different macro trends that are out there today, drawing on democratic innovation really deeply, using participatory budgeting, citizens assemblies, legislative theater, all of these kinds of methods that we've met on how to save democracy in as many ways as possible. So what you're doing is empowering citizens to have a role in decision making. But I also think it's about things like a different approach to public services. I draw on this trend of relational public services that's being tapped into by at least 80 different administrations across the world. And what they're doing with that is, is taking an approach to the people who have the most complex needs that says we're going to unlock your contribution as citizens by giving you an individual caseworker who will build a relationship with you. And we believe in the contribution you can make and want to unlock that, rather than seeing them as difficult service users who need to be served and catered to by multiple different services which end up becoming bloated and costing an awful lot of money, actually. And then trends like community wealth building, which is really about believing in the potential of local economies putting government in service of what community can become and, and how communities can build sort of powerful economies within themselves. And I think that the idea of what I was trying to do here, what I'm trying to do with this work is say actually there's a broad agenda of citizen empowerment, an idea really of reorienting the state citizen relationship to see people as sources of ideas and energy and resources rather than just as consumers of services, as members of communities who can be unleashed rather than as self interested individuals who need to be served. And I think there is a kind of, there is a deep skepticism, I'd call it cynicism actually in the world right now that I think is the deepest danger. I think it's our friend ECE Temulkuran, who we've done a couple of episodes of how to Save Democracy with, has this very lovely phrase where she talks about faith in humanity as the essential. And actually I think the skepticism about these ideas when it comes, comes from a place of lack of faith in humanity. And I think we need to confront that really openly. If you don't believe, if you fundamentally believe that humans are inherently selfish kind of nasty creatures and the best you can do for them is to serve that self interest and try and manage it, then we are in real trouble. If though you can take that leap of imagination, that leap of faith in humanity that says no, actually given the right conditions, humans can and want to contribute, they want to be useful and kind. We just need to design systems that tap into that. Then I think we can create something incredibly powerful. But I want to be really open. That I think is the challenge. We're not going to design the kind of systems we need from a place of essentially kind of lack of belief in ourselves as a species, I think 22 00:16:54.000 --> 00:17:39.000 independently of our listeners beliefs in whether that version of humanity or the other. Your solution dos is doing things with people and I think with the action then we have the change that we want, like this collaboration, this interdependence will shift. And I think that's the best way to really change the perception of humanity when we do things together. And I was wondering if you have an example of what a Tuesday afternoon would look like in a government that has adopted a dose run those run system. If there is an example that you think of where this could really work. 23 00:17:39.000 --> 00:22:05.000 I mean I think the Tuesday afternoon stuff, one of the things I do in the paper is I talk about the boring revolution. The idea that actually there's really small day to day Changes that need to show up. And it's in things like job titles. One of the moments that inspired some of the work in this essay. A few years back, I was working with a set of councils in the UK and I came across a group of staff whose. Whose job title was Heads of Democratic Services. I was like, democracy is not a service, my friends. And job titles are a really powerful carrier of the idea of the role of government that we're embedding. So on a Tuesday afternoon it might be about, like, what's the meeting culture? How do we start meetings and do we have meeting rooms that actually are named after parts of the local community, rather than being Meeting Room 1 and painted in gray, like, do we bring the spirit of the community, community and the place into our government buildings? So those sorts of things are part of the boring revolution. But actually I'm almost more focused on the big moments that can be different. And so I mentioned, I talked about the riots in summer 2024, but in a US context. And this is where I've been writing the paper. I was really struck by how when Biden and his team launched the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge investment, like $780 billion of investment in climate and energy infrastructure, essentially that was done in a way that sort of an announcement from the White House away from people. And I think what a dose agenda. If there were a Department of Citizen Empowerment influencing what the Biden administration had been doing, I think they would have done it very differently. And I draw in the paper on examples and inspiration from particular, particularly from Wales, actually, and how the Welsh government developed their well Being of Future Generations act in the 2000 and tens. And that started with a massive national conversation called the Wales We Want, inviting people to be part of visioning the future of the country and then built a set of processes that actually were about unlocking people's agency. My sort of thought experiment in the paper goes to, well, what if actually the US had done a similar process? What if instead of just sort of announcing an amount of money and then trying to figure out how to get it into places around the country for people, like, with government doing it, what if there had been a massive hosting of a conversation about the future? We want the United States, we want. What if there had then been a bunch of this money allocated as participatory budgeting at the state level, in the city level, what if there had been citizens assemblies and citizens juries as part of the governance structure of these funds? What if there had been matched crowdfunding as Part of it. And what if the whole thing had been framed as the Future Generations act, not the Inflation Reduction Act? So you really lean into this idea that people want to be part of something meaningful in the world. And actually the polling shows that from that time, at least two thirds of the US population were actually in support of a positive aspiration, aspirational climate agenda. And so there's a real sense for me that on a Tuesday afternoon or in any given moment, we are really close actually to a very different state of affairs in our world. The will in people and in communities to be useful, kind contributors to the work of building a different future is there. Governments want people to contribute, but don't sort of believe that they can open up and invite that. And these processes of democratic innovation, of community wealth building, of relational public services are there, and we're just so close, but stuck, I think. And what I'm trying to do with the paper is show that this is emerging around the world. There have been examples, and if we can piece this together, we could do something really powerful in this time. 24 00:22:05.000 --> 00:25:01.000 So one of the things that I think is really interesting about John's paper is it tackles one of the most significant problems for thinking around citizen empowerment and democratic innovations, which is how do we connect these to the existing political system in some way? How do we embed them with our more traditional institutions so that they can find their promise, but then also not become a kind of world of their own, apart from the kind of institutions of power? And the comparison with Doge here, I think, is a really nice one, because I think the motivation for Doge and why a lot of people supported it, was that it was meant to be, in a way, outside of the traditional institutions of democracy. Right. So it was meant to be a government department, but it was also meant to be somewhat independent of them. Right. It wasn't going to be shackled by Congress. Right. It wasn't going to have to go through the procedures of talking to other departments. It would make decisions, it would do them quickly, and that's what would produce this efficiency, which just hadn't happened in the past. Right. Cuts and efficiency gains that just the other institutions had failed to give. That was the aspiration. And there is some truth in the fact that traditional institutions can be slow and cumbersome, but there's also very significant risk, which is what I think Doges end up doing, which is that it just ends up lacking all legitimacy. The headline is, of course, Musk, a billionaire who backed the president in the election with all his resources gets given a very huge amount of power. Hard to see that having much democratic legitimacy. But even if it wasn't a character like Musk, there was very little democratic debate. This person was very unclear what accountability he had, what the rules and scope of doge should have been. So there's real lack of legitimacy. The other way of doing it, which I think is what, what John has in mind for dose and for citizen empowerment is that you build these in connection with those traditional institutions. So your example of the Biden legislation is have citizen empowerment, have democratic innovations working alongside and contributing to that traditional legislative process and then you don't get the legitimacy cost. In fact, you might even boost legitimacy because we have the standard forms, plus all of this citizen engagement and voice, which we don't normally have. But then there's also the risk on the other side, right, which is that you get shackled to these institutions, I think in your own diagnosis are kind of failing us. So I'm wondering a bit about how you, John, think about that trade off. I mean, I do think there's a kind of danger of having these forms of CISO empowerment too closely aligned to for example, an institution like Congress in the US which has just been increasingly struggling to pass any significant kind of legislation. Gridlock is the word in Washington. So how do you think about that relationship between citizens of empowerment and the traditional institutions? 25 00:25:01.000 --> 00:27:38.000 I think this goes back to your first contribution in this conversation, Jonny. Actually what I am trying to do is respond to the crises of our institutions by acknowledging that they exist, that these things aren't working, but respond to that with a kind of yes and rather than a throw everything out. And I think what I imagine dose units to do and be is kind of creators of space for the institutions to evolve. And I guess I'm also thinking from around the world and from some of the examples that I've written into the paper, again, I don't think that the fracture, the collapse of our institutions, the failure of our institutions, let me say, is actually that fundamental. Like I look at the Taiwanese government and how they responded to the COVID crisis and the creation of participation officers in every government department who acted as a kind of network in the buildup to that moment over the previous six or eight years and, and how they were able to create the space for the culture to shift the combination of these day to day roles and day to day changes, the boring revolution and then the creation in the context of COVID of a telephone line anyone could ring into with ideas for how the Country's response could be better. The creation of challenge prizes that would tap into the tech community to create the apps that would track face mask availability and case outbreaks and so on. These things didn't require wholesale destruction of the existing institutional capacity, but through a combination of kind of day to day shifts and big like moments where government operated in a different way, there's this kind of evolution that happens. The space is created for an evolution to happen. What I'm saying in some ways is sort of probably less radical than a lot of people in that I'm saying I don't actually believe that our institutions are that broken. I think the people in them can operate differently and want to. I think we're stuck more than we are broken. Does that make sense? 26 00:27:38.000 --> 00:28:18.000 Yeah, that certainly makes sense. And I think that idea of stuck, not broken, is a very nice one. But in the end, I think so much of this is going to depend on the context. So I think a critic to what you just said would maybe draw on the Taiwanese example by just saying, well, the Taiwanese government was probably a lot more effective than the American government to start with, and therefore it was able to use citizen participation in this more effective way. But then the answer would be find out what parts of the system I guess are working and then how do we connect citizens of how into those ways in order they can work even better. And once you've got that example, we can start to look to fix the kind of wider elements of the system. 27 00:28:18.000 --> 00:29:17.000 And I think that's exactly the spirit of all of my work, actually. I often quote my friend Cormac Russell, who we should have on the podcast at some stage. But Cormac speaks in aphorisms very beautifully. And one of the things he says is start with what's strong, not with what's wrong, and then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. And he's saying that in the context of community. Actually his work is all about saying, like in community, high streets and towns actually have a lot of energy and we should start by celebrating what's good and then build on it rather than starting with the problems. But I think it applies here to institutions as well. What I'm trying to do with this work is say, actually there is a different way of doing government emerging all over the world world. All we need to do is stare at that, build on it, celebrate it. Rather than starting every conversation with why exactly is government broken? We should start with where is government working and how can we do more of that? 28 00:29:17.000 --> 00:29:24.000 John, who is this paper for, like, who do you want to read your paper and do something about it? 29 00:29:24.000 --> 00:32:55.000 So let me step back from it a little bit, because the way I see this moment in time that we're living in, as I've hinted a couple of times, I think we're really close to a very different world, because I actually think that in a lot of ways, all of what we need is here already. I see people in communities across the world starting to step into their agency, starting to build their own institutions, starting to build different ways of working, starting to take ownership of local assets, starting to grow food, starting to build their own energy systems. This is all really happening. And I think from that perspective, there's really two parts of my theory of change in this moment. The first is that that has to carry on. It has to connect up. We have to be able to see that people in communities can find the answers ourselves. There is an important, vital power in kind of leaning in and doing it. And so anyone who's listening to this podcast, the key part of what we're saying, really, I think, is like, show up in the place you live and love, connect with other people, start to ask what you can do together. That work is the essential in this moment in time. And what I saw in that moment in 2024 when Starmer didn't acknowledge and validate the energy in communities that is there, was that there is a vital role of government. And it's not to do it all for us, but I almost imagine it as like, people in communities coming together and showing power and stepping into agency as sort of reaching a hand upward. And what I think governments need to do is open up and reach a hand kind of to meet that and hold it. And when that can happen, I think transformation can happen incredibly quickly. And so, really, with this paper, I'm sort of stepping out of what is maybe my more usual, more comfortable role in kind of going and telling stories in communities and pollinating and meeting people and celebrating what they're doing and trying to say, well, actually, no. Look, as a. No one else seems to be taking this challenge of speaking into the culture corridors of existing power and saying, if you guys open up, there's something building. And so I guess what I'm trying to do is, with the sort of legitimacy, with those folks of a Harvard Fellowship, to say, to speak to people in positions of existing power and influence and say, open these institutions up. Here's how you can do it. Here's who's doing it already. And if you can do that, People are ready to meet you. And so this intervention is, this paper I've written is slightly uncomfortable for me because what I feel most joy and comfort doing is going around the places where people aren't waiting for permission and are just doing it. But ultimately I do believe there's important work for governments to do in, in seeing that and opening up to it. And in a way, stepping back like a Department of Citizen Empowerment isn't getting governments to do more, it's in a sense getting them to do less. But in doing so, it's moving them from a role of kind of delivering for people to holding the space for people to do what they're already wanting to do. 30 00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:43.000 So it's really putting the resources, the massive resources of government and the structure and the organization to support what is already existing but not massively present enough to become the dominant way of us interacting as human beings. And you see this gap and you see that we can have this massive jump or leap in our development as a species. All these resources connected together. And the politician also step into this vision of citizens and supporting them, not giving away their power, but using their power to service what is already happening. 31 00:33:43.000 --> 00:34:09.000 It's like the fundamental shift is from trying to do things for people and trying to be the hero to enabling people to do things for themselves, doing things with people, being the facilitator. And really that's the core of the invitation. It's to step from a mode of delivery to a mode of empowerment. 32 00:34:09.000 --> 00:34:15.000 What's your view, Jonny, on John's call of action? Kind of. I feel it's a call of action for politicians here. 33 00:34:15.000 --> 00:35:43.000 I think the call for action is a great one. I think John kind of nailed it on the importance of having a theory of change. We have a lot of blueprints, academics and myself, like coming up with these bold and lovely plans for how we can get citizens involved. We could have sortition assemblies and participate, budgeting, doing all kinds of things. But the question of how you get from here to those places which seem in many ways quite distant from our current political reality is the kind of really key question. And I think John is right that that area of change, that call for action, will be both from the bottom and from the top right. So it's not going to happen. You can't just get people to act in the way in which you want to by just having politicians set things up and hoping the community will follow. But nor can you have community that are level having widespread changes unless it has the backing of the state and all its resources. So it's that inside, outside strategy, as it's sometimes called, that will be really crucial in kind of driving forward this agenda of citizen empowerment. And we need to think a lot about how the state and the kind of more local levels can together start experimenting more and bringing up these beautiful examples, for example, that you put in your reports from Taiwan, from Wales, from Texas. The more of those we have, the more we can see that kind of road forward for citizens empowerment. 34 00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:54.000 And the Department of Citizens Empowerment is the right place to experiment for governments who want to try to bring these two spaces that don't usually collaborate massively together. 35 00:35:54.000 --> 00:38:22.000 I want to say one other thing, actually, which is that I do think these sorts of things are starting to exist. So Bologna in Italy has an Office of Civic Imagination. There are several Mexican states that have Offices of Citizen Participation. And Mamdani in New York, there's the Office of Mass Engagement. These things are all. None of these things are quite what I'm imagining with the Department of Citizens Empowerment. But there's something in the waters, institutionally, structurally as well. So I don't think this is. In some ways, this is a radical piece of thinking, a very different thing, a challenge. And really, I've put it out there in part because I got so frustrated that the dominant discussions from a kind of a progressive agenda, shall we say, like when Doge happened, the commentators from a progressive perspective were like, doge is asking the right questions. Jeff Mulgen, who is a prominent kind of civil servant service thinker, actually used those exact words. He said, doge is asking the right questions, but the answers are slightly wrong. And then Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, the authors of a book called Abundance that's come out in the States, it's hugely influential. They're also sort of saying, like, we're doing the right things. We just need to get bureaucracy like government rules out of. There's too many rules getting in the way. And I believe that that conversation is just so limited because it's all about efficiency. How can we enable government to deliver better what it's already trying to do? Do it cheaper, faster, quicker? And I'm like, no, we need to ask a bigger question, which is, what is the role of government? How can government relate to citizens differently? How can we tap into this standing resource that we see in protest movements all over the world, where people are essentially saying, we want more of a role? How can we tap into that energy that is making people bring images of rowing crews and orchestras to focus groups and not just try and keep doing it for people. That's the sort of frustration in me that's making me want to get this into the world. We need more imagination in the conversation. 36 00:38:22.000 --> 00:38:27.000 We need more imagination. Where can we read your paper? 37 00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:55.000 So the paper is. You can download it. I'm sure we'll put it in the show notes, but you can download it from the Ash center website, the Harvard Kennedy School, and you can also find me@johnalexander.net and you can probably. You'll be able to download it there as well. So, yeah, send it to your politicians, send it to your governments. Let's rattle this cage. 38 00:38:55.000 --> 00:39:10.000 This was how to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezin Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett. 39 00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:28.000 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or if you want to get closer, find us online at howtosavedemocracy co and sign up to the mailing list. We've got big plans, so if you can chip in to help us make make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.