Martin Ford & Adam Gurri

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but we still have an amazing show for you today. Futurist Martin Ford stops spy to talk about the updated version of his new book, Rise of the Robots, Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.
But first, we'll talk to Liberal Currents own Adam Gurri about how Democrats can fix our broken government. Welcome, welcome, Adam.

**Adam Gurri** (0:32)
Thank you for having me.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:33)
So you're the publisher and co-founder of Liberal Currents. Liberal Currents is a magazine that is sort of a thought magazine, I think a bit as. You guys have set out to publish something called the Reconstruction Papers. So explain to us what that is.

**Adam Gurri** (0:49)
Yes. So a lot of the Trump era is characterized by what we're against. We are against destroying the government. We are against deporting 20 million people. We're against ending democracy. We want a vision for what we're going to do after the victory.
Obviously, victory can't be assumed. We have to fight for it, to keep being against the things that are happening. But we need some vision for the future. I think vision was lacking not just in the Trump era, but we're really in the decades before that as well. So the Reconstruction Papers in the first essay by Nicholas Grossman is very much a, how do we get out of this crisis in the short term? But the rest of them are very focused on, how do we fix higher education? What's the right trade policy actually? That's not neoliberal or this kind of like vulgar tariffs situation. What do we actually do with America's military? Now that the Cold War is over, now that we're sort of no longer the sole power in the world, it's getting more of a multilateral world. A lot of big questions like that for thinking about the long term.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:47)
Yeah, a lot of people think that part of the problem with the sort of four years between Trump on and Trump too was that there was not enough ambitious legislation to curb corruption, make things illegal. So talk us through sort of what are the tenets of this reconstruction.

**Adam Gurri** (2:08)
Yeah, it's hard to summarize because it's a fairly broad set of areas. A few of the core pillars, I would say, are fixing Congress specifically because a lot of the overall problems are downstream of Congress' dysfunction. So, you know, there's a lot of different essays that sort of rest on that. Some of them go at it specifically. So like Kevin Elliott is a political theorist. He writes about what can we do about the Senate and offers a lot of creative ideas there. Others, it's more connected. So our essay on military policy talks about regrounding military actions in congressional authorization and oversight, including congressional authorization of military action, but also just regular reauthorizations of what the military is, having the Congress legislatively more actively involved in shaping the military. A lot of it does come down to just fixing what has been broken in Congress and recentering it in our system. But that includes, for example, getting the Supreme Court out of the way of a lot of things. Nick's essay, Expanding the Court is in there. Other essays make passing reference to what could be done other than just that.
I mentioned in my essay, the Wyden Plan from a few years ago from Senator Wyden about just having fixed appointments every presidential term and things like that. It almost doesn't matter what, as long as Congress actually steps in and makes the Court, sort of humbles it a little bit in some way. Those are big parts of it.
But the overall is just, we'd stuck with a lot of sick institutions for a long time. Essentially, since the Cold War and really longer, there are a lot of arrangements that were made in the earlier era that were really historical achievements then. Like our system of higher education, incredible global historical achievement. Our system of public funding of science, same. Even our approach to trade in the post-war world before Nixon was incredibly functional. But now a lot of those things have either been destroyed over time, like the trade example, or they've just gotten decrepit and bad. My entire lifetime, essentially, tuitions have exploded in cost. But that wasn't really a problem before that, right? That was a relatively, relatively historically recent problem. So the whole idea is a lot was already broken before Trump. Trump came in and has sort of taken a hammer to a lot of what was already weak. And so what we should not do is return to where we were before Trump. We need to actually think now that we have to pick up the pieces, what can we build that will be better than what we had across a lot of areas.