Is democracy still possible? Can the people still hold government accountable? Yes, but that requires working together. And working together requires organizing. Dorian Warren joins host Alex Lovit to talk about building people power, some of the victories that collective organizing has already achieved, and why he believes the United States is on the precipice of building a fairer and more inclusive democracy. Dorian Warren is the co-president of Community Change, a national organization founded in 1968 to build the power of low-income people, especially people of color, to create a multiracial democracy and a fair economy where everyone can thrive. https://www.communitychange.org/
Dorian Warren:
We have a lot more resources than our forebears to organize and to change things. And it's happening in places, and it might not always be visible, but we have lots of experimentation innovation happening, of people solving really big problems that point to the future.
Alex Lovit:
Self-rule, government of the people, by the people, for the people. These are terms we often hear when we talk about democracy, but what does democracy mean in practice? Well, there's voting, but even that usually only steers things a little to the right or left, and the steering wheel is kind of broken. Fortunately, participating in democracy is so much more than voting. Working together in community to make our voices heard, that can happen every day, not just on election day. It can feel daunting to know where to start though. People power is easy to recognize when it's at its peak, but where does it begin and how can each of us play a role?
You are listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit.
My guest today is Dorian Warren. Dorian is the Co-President of Community Change, which is a national organization that builds the power of low income people and pushes for a multiracial democracy and a fair economy. And they've had some seriously impressive wins, which we'll get into today. It's a scary time for American democracy, but Dorian is an optimist. He doesn't just think significant positive change is possible. He says it's already happening.
Dorian Warren, welcome to The Context.
Dorian Warren:
Thanks for having me, Alex.
Alex Lovit:
I don't know how you're feeling, but I'm pretty freaked out right now about the state of my country, the state of our democracy. And I want to be on the right side of history. I show up at the protests, I donate and volunteer for causes that I believe in, but mostly I feel like I'm just kind of waiting around for somebody to tell me what to do. I wait for somebody to tell me there's a protest and then, I show up and then ,I'm not really sure how much impact it's having. So you're an organizer. What should I be doing? Can organizing help me?
Dorian Warren:
Organizing can definitely help. And in fact, it is probably one of the only ways out of this situation in which we find ourselves. If I can go back to something you started with, Alex, about how you feel, I most days feel conflicted, deeply overwhelmed on the one hand about the state of the world. I am a parent and a father, so I worry endlessly about my children and what's the world in which they will inherit. So I have all the similar anxieties. And at the same time, I'm very optimistic. I'm very optimistic about this period and what comes next, most importantly. And maybe you'll appreciate this as a historian, part of what gives me that hopefulness is our history. We've been in situations like this before and in some cases, much worse in lots of cases with many less resources. We have created new things that advance democracy and justice, and I think we're in that moment now.
Alex Lovit:
Okay. So how can I be part of the solution?
Dorian Warren:
I would say start where you are. Start where you are. Wherever you live, whatever you call home, your neighborhood, your local community that is where most people, actually on a daily basis, have the most change. It might not be so visible. And let me give you maybe two quick examples. The first is from the COVID period, which I know a lot of us don't want to talk about anymore, it seems to have been lost to collective memory a little bit. But one of the things we might remember from the pandemic was how people came together to help each other, what we might call mutual aid, which there is a long tradition, but people came together to support each other.
Yes, that's six years ago. Let me give you a more recent example. And that would be, say, from Minnesota. I know you've talked in the show and everyone's aware of what's happened with ICE in communities the last two years. But in Minnesota, what was really interesting to watch were people who came together at a very local level. By local, I mean street level, neighborhood level, just to bear witness to what was happening in their community and then yes, to take the extra step to either protest or help out others. So there are all sorts of ways in which people can get involved and that is really the essence of organizing. It's how do you bring people together to solve a collective problem? What just popped in my head was the famous Frederick Douglass quote, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and never will." Yes, in our system of government, you have to put pressure on decision makers to listen and in some cases, to win a demand.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so in the examples you just gave, and I appreciate you bringing up COVID, as painful as our memories are of that, I think we too often treat it as a failure. And of course, mistakes were made, but all of humanity, basically globally, changed their lives to try to save lives and we did. We saved millions of lives. That's an example of collective action that, because it had to be six feet apart, was organized almost entirely online, but it can often feel like that's limited. First of all, in my own social network, a lot of my friends agree with me already and then, it feels like a small limited conversation about a huge problem. How do you think about that issue of scale?
Dorian Warren:
Oh, that's interesting. It all starts with an ask in a sense or you raising your hand to take an action that enables you to join together with others in a larger action. So the scale thing, let me say it in a different way. I just took a trip with my colleagues to Montgomery, Alabama, and learning again the stories of how the Montgomery bus boycott came about was instructive here because these were people, ordinary people, poor and working class people. They were in community, yes, and they had various ties, whether through churches or neighborhood associations or just social networks. And it probably started with an ask, frankly, a conversation like, "This isn't right. Something's not right about this." But something happened in that process where people had a lot of conversations, had a lot of ask and then, were mobilized into a campaign that required them to not ride those buses for over 365 days, to walk to work, to walk to the store, to carpool if they could. It wasn't professional nonprofit advocates, like who I am now, who were saying, "We need to do this." That really was a grassroots organizing-
Alex Lovit:
And it wasn't just Martin Luther King either. I mean-
Dorian Warren:
He came in late. That's right. There was infrastructure, maybe that's what I want to say is there was an infrastructure within that local civil society and people embedded in webs of networks of social relationships, family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, who could talk to each other and could ask each other to take what was a risky action and a costly action, but the costs always go down when you do it together. Maybe this is an important part we don't talk about in community organizing often. Maybe I'll say two things here. One is I'm really drawn by the work of the political scientist, Hahrie Hahn at Johns Hopkins, who's written eloquently about this.
Alex Lovit:
She's been on the show.
Dorian Warren:
Oh, excellent. But one of the things I've learned from her is belonging over belief, meaning even if you don't all agree on the same thing, but the belonging part is really important to ultimately get people to take action together. You can find joy, dare I say, in coming together. You can have fun coming together. We're in a loneliness epidemic, I hear, so it can be a way to not feel lonely and alone under conditions of inequality. And most importantly, as I think about those people in Montgomery, when people come together to take action, they almost always do it on faith. There is a certain faith that your action can change your conditions. It's easy to look back and say, "Oh, they were so heroic and they were, and they didn't know how it was going to turn out, but they knew enough to know that they had to do something to try to make the world a little bit better."
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. There had been bus boycotts in other cities that did not end up overturning Jim Crow.
Dorian Warren:
Yes.
Alex Lovit:
But when I think about Montgomery, which I agree, is every time I read or think about it's just an amazing story and a story about thousands of people, like 99% of black Montgomeryans boycotted the buses. That's just amazing. And building these networks of mutual aid, of driving, building their own bus system basically with a lot fewer resources. But then the other thing I'm thinking about, that is an authoritarian environment. These are people that are not able to vote at that time in Alabama, they are facing violence. And I'm wondering if, as we feel now, I mean, I'm feeling now that the United States is becoming more authoritarian. I'm worried about backlash and violence more than I ever have been in my life. And I'm wondering if we can draw lessons from that history of folks that also faced that fear and much more so than me right now.
Dorian Warren:
Heavy question. It's something I think and worry about a lot too. I'll say it this way. Every time my five-year-old sees the National Guard when I'm driving her to school or someplace, she asks me what that's all about. And it's a very painful conversation to have to explain in so many words why the nation's capital is still under an unnecessary military occupation. And it pains me every time I have to have that conversation, explain like why is this not normal. Because it's very easy for it to become normalized, for people to just get used to it and not remember what it was like before when we didn't have National Guard at our street corners or ICE agents at schools. And so, I just want to acknowledge the fear and the pain and the risk and the harm of living under authoritarian conditions.
And Alex, you're the historian here, but I do read a lot of history because it gives me relief and solace and it reminds me that yes, we have been under both racially authoritarian and because I know you had Jeff Winters on your podcast earlier oligarchic conditions. We have been here before and it's instructive to look outside our borders at other countries in the world that are also under authoritarian oligarchic governments and how people are resisting and envisioning something better. It's also instructive to look at our own history and especially in the American South because there is no clearer place for me of where authoritarianism and oligarchy came together for centuries to oppress a whole class of people. And yet, and yet, and yet, with little resources in terms of money, let's say, other kinds of resources, people always fought back.
I kind of walk around in my head with the Reconstruction period, the First Reconstruction after the Civil War and of course, the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement. And I think a lot about what is the Third Reconstruction? Yes, Reverend Barber is the more modern person I've heard this from in the last decade. I've used the term a lot. It's becoming more popular. But I think the Third Reconstruction is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. There are so many experiments around organizing and policy change in states and cities that are pointing towards what is ahead of us and what is a possible future. I think of universal childcare in New Mexico. It's just about to enter the first year of its implementation. So that is something that for years people said was impossible and then of course, now it's possible.
Alex Lovit:
That's something I didn't even know had happened until I started reading up on you. Also, I think it's a success story of organizing.
Dorian Warren:
Yes.
Alex Lovit:
So talk about what is the work that led to that result and then, what is the result? What does it mean to have universal childcare?
Dorian Warren:
Great question. So Community Change, we were born in 1968 by leaders of the Civil Rights, Labor Movements, as well as many people who worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administration in the war on poverty. And for almost 60 years, we have worked with grassroots community organizations around the country to provide strategy support, other kinds of resources to help people organize locally to change their communities. So that's by way of background. And so about a decade ago, we were working with a group in New Mexico called OLÉ, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, a statewide grassroots organization of poor and working class people, multiracial, people living in poverty. And they were running various campaigns dealing with issues of poverty. And one of the things that emerged from conversations with their members are just people in the community who identify two things. One, that the cost of childcare, and this is 10 years ago, was really unaffordable and out of reach for too many families. And two, that the providers, that childcare providers make poverty wages for doing essential work.
There's a long history, by the way, of childcare that we can get into, but for doing essential work and in some ways, wow, the most trusted work you can imagine. I hand over my two-year-old to childcare providers every single morning. That is an act of trust in the deepest way. That is my two-year-old is precious to me, and I'm trusting every single day that she will be cared for, that she will learn, and she will come back to me at the end of the day healthy. And the fact that, now I'm editorializing here a little bit, the fact that the women and some men, but the women who do this work, majority women of color who do this work, get paid poverty wages is unacceptable, unacceptable in the richest democracy in the history of the world. Why do people, who are up at 5:00 in the morning and probably at their center or their home-based care ready to accept kids at 6:00, 6:30, why would they be making poverty-level wages for something that should be a public good, something that we all benefit from, healthy children?
The conversations 10 years ago in New Mexico were about the fact that these providers were making poverty wages and families couldn't afford it. And so started organizing around this issue of childcare. A lot of it started with strategic imagination and visioning. What would it look like to have a different kind of system where childcare was accessible to everybody, was affordable, and where the providers got paid a living wage for the work they do? And so, there were several experiments around policy change over the last decade, many of which failed. The organizing kept happening. The organization kept recruiting new people, new providers and new parents to join the organization and then, be enlisted in a campaign around childcare. So that's roughly 2018, 2019. Fast-forward to 2022, I believe, is when the campaign led by OLÉ, the grassroots organization, got an initiative on the ballot to put to voters changing the constitution around childcare and basically arguing childcare should be a public good, it should be accessible to everyone.
And so, voters went to the polls that November, and I think it was roughly 70% voted for this constitutional amendment that laid out a pathway to provide universal childcare. The implementation started about a year ago, so in fall of 2025. Implementation really started to really make it real. And I think we should be seeing a report out soon of the first year results of that. But what I can tell you is thousands of families, I think something like 10,000 to 15,000 more families have access to universal childcare today that did not have it last year, and the providers are making a living wage. What that means is two things. For the families, given we're in a whole affordability conversation as well as an inequality conversation, it means that the cost of childcare was taken off of their household ledger. So it's a different way into the affordability conversation.
So anyway, long story short, in New Mexico, families are getting relief because they have now access to a public good, which should have been a public good in the first place, but that took 10 years. It took 10 years of a small group of people initially coming together, then talking to more and more people, recruiting people into a campaign, and then some failures along the way and then success. And now, we're at the implementation phase of what is a 10-year arc of an idea going from an idea to a policy.
Alex Lovit:
If I put myself back 10 years ago, I would think that there would be a couple of challenges to the work that Community Change was doing, the work that OLÉ was doing to get this done. So one of those would be that it would be very easy to pit these two groups against each other, the parents and the childcare providers, and the market did pit them against each other. So you got to get those folks organized together.
Dorian Warren:
Yes.
Alex Lovit:
And then, the other challenge is you're talking about people that are struggling with affordability, you're talking about working class folks, people that have fewer resources, and those people might tend to feel powerless. It might be harder to get that population to feel that they can change the world maybe than better resourced populations. How do you think about those challenges?
Dorian Warren:
The challenge of getting people to feel some sense of agency or efficacy is a constant challenge. I think we probably feel it individually in our lives, much less as a collective of people. And so part of, I think, the techniques and strategy of very good organizing is you have to build in smaller wins along the way for people to feel a sense of agency and to feel a sense of efficacy. And so it's not that the organizers and the folks on the ground in New Mexico started out with this idea of we're going to win constitutional amendments around universal childcare. They might have started really much smaller, "Hey, can we organize and talk to our state legislators around maybe some more resources into childcare," or to be even more granular, often the common story of community organizing is you start with a stop sign. You need a stop sign in your community, you organize your neighborhood, you organize to get the stop sign, and then you can ladder up to other things.
Okay, now let's go to the neighborhood level. What would we want to see in our neighborhood? Do we want a park? Do we want a pool? Do we want some other kind of public good? And you run a campaign and you win that and then, you keep laddering up. You can't invite people into something that is de-powering. You got to give people a sense of efficacy and agency that their action, their risk even, will make a difference in their lives or people around them or in the future. And so, there is a technique here to what I would call good organizing where you want to invite people into something to change their lives, but you also have to give them a sense of momentum, of some wins, and dare I say it, a little bit of joy, a little bit of fun. We've kind of lost that. I think politics can't always be dire. It can't always be dark. It can't always be hopeless because no one's going to join that party.
A couple weeks ago, there is some very joyful protest outside the Kennedy Center of dance parties and things given the controversy there. And what's important about the New Mexico story is at least two things. One, it's important for New Mexico residents to feel empowered that they can change their own lives and to create something better. It's also important for people in every other state in the union. So I can tell you, folks from Minnesota, very much interested in what happened in New Mexico, did some learning from the folks in New Mexico and now, they're gearing up to do a campaign around universal childcare in that state next year.
So these things are also, they diffuse, they're replicable, they're inspiring when you see some of these often rare victories, but they're the thing that other people looking around say, "Oh, that's not just an abstract idea. Well, they did it. So if they could do it, why can't we do it?" And then, I think that is how change often happens in our country.
Alex Lovit:
I think often organizing requires getting groups that might be pitted against each other to recognize common interests. So you mentioned earlier the childcare providers and the parents, getting them to see their common interests. And I think the most common way throughout American history that people have been pitted against each other has been race. You were correct in saying the Jim Crow South was an oligarchy and white southerners, poor white southerners, they weren't really benefiting from that system.
Dorian Warren:
No.
Alex Lovit:
But they were being divided. As an organizer, how can you try to work against those divisions and maybe people actively trying to widen those divisions?
Dorian Warren:
That's a longstanding challenge from the founding, as you just pointed out, and it's not lost on me that post-Civil War in the Reconstruction period when we built new public schools for the first time, who benefited, not just the formerly enslaved, but poor white people did too. That's the first time poor whites in the south got public education. And their ability to take advantage of that public good came through black freedom. So part of the challenge for us in terms of storytelling is one, to tell these stories of what happens when we come together, who benefits and who loses, and who benefits from us being a part and who benefits from us coming together.
But more sharply to your point, if I had a principle here, it's punch up, don't punch down. The oligarchs punch down and they try to get us to punch horizontally at each other or to pick on the person with less power than we might have. So if you're a poor white person in the south a century ago, your job was to punch down at black people because even though you were suffering too, especially economically, if someone was below you, you therefore could feel a little better about your life, what Du Bois called The Wages of Whiteness in a sense. I mean, the job of an organizer is a little bit about how do you reorient people not to punch down, and I think we're in that moment now. We are in a populous moment right now of people looking up and saying, "Oh my goodness, what is going on with these trillionaires and billionaires? How are they making all this money? And I'm still struggling, and prices are going up and my wages are not going up."
Alex Lovit:
Can government help with that? I mean, are there ways that government policy can help build that sense of shared interest, collective responsibility, people power?
Dorian Warren:
Absolutely, absolutely. One of the examples that comes immediately to mind is this, I won't call it a trend yet, this idea of participatory budgeting. Many cities have experimented with it. I think the results are varied. When I lived in New York City, I was thrilled to participate in this in my local neighborhood. I was living in East Harlem. I remember going to a local school gymnasium to take a look at all these projects. There were maybe 50 projects being proposed for my neighborhood and we got to vote on 10 of them. That's an example of government saying, "Hey, we want to create another mechanism for you in between elections to have some voice, to be more democratic, to get you to participate." And government should be doing that all the time. So participatory budgeting is one example.
I've been in a conversation with some scholars about this notion of policy feedback loops or how do you think about how to design policy so that you're not just creating beneficiaries, but you're creating constituents. Here's what I mean by that. In 2021, during COVID, yes, in the pandemic, we did this big experiment and in 2021, we passed legislation that expanded the child tax credit for six months. And what the researchers found at the end of the six-month experiment of this was that child poverty dropped by almost half. I tell that story because every time I say that sentence in six months, child poverty dropped almost in half, I still am startled. That is lightning speed in any policy impact world you might imagine. That is mind-blowing to me as a political scientist, as an organizer. And then, you can see my energy too, I get excited by it because if we could do that in six months, what can't we do in a year or two years.
The problem with the policy though, from a design perspective, was that it wasn't visible. People weren't aware. They just got checks. Maybe some people like me and you were like, "Oh, I can identify the source of this thing." But most people are just like, "Oh, okay. $500 or $250 a month for my kid, that's great." So it wasn't visible and we didn't actually do much organizing of the people receiving the benefit. One reason why that's important in this case is because it requires you to file your taxes. A lot of people left the money on the table and didn't get access to that benefit. So if we, just from a design perspective, and this is where this policy feedback loop comes in, how might we design policies better that encourage more participation? There's a lot of good thinking happening right now about what are the ways in which we can encourage participation outside of the election context.
Alex Lovit:
You're kind of answering my next question before I ask it, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is if your preferred candidates win upcoming elections, whoever they may be, I have a long wishlist of what I would like. Hey, universal childcare would be nice. I don't think we're going to get it here in Ohio anytime soon, but that's on the list. And also, I see a political system, a democratic system that has real problems. Universal childcare, people will feel. Gerrymandering reform, who's going to notice? It would have positive effects, I think, long-term effects. It might make in the long-term easier to have government that is more responsive. How do you think about that challenge? What should politicians be focused on building a democratic system that works while also making real impacts in people's lives?
Dorian Warren:
I think it's both and. There's sort of a how do we advance democracy? What are the ways in which we can change the rules so that people's voices are heard and that the system is actually responsive to the people? We are a country with lots of different factions and communities of interest. So for the pro-democracy folks that really, really care about democracy, great. I want them to keep going, keep helping us democratize the country for poor working class people that might want and are very passionate about material things in the immediate. How am I going to pay my bills when I have all these costs that keep going up that I cannot afford because the minimum wage hasn't gone up in how long? We're still at 7.25 an hour nationally, which is absurd to me. So people might be motivated first and foremost by more immediate material things, but I guarantee you if they're engaged in any length of time and you have some conversations with them, you'll find they care about democracy too in some way or form. They care about their voices being heard, which is ultimately what democracy means.
And so to go back to our example, we keep going back to, the Montgomery bus boycott participants, they cared about an injustice, right, segregation on buses that was partly material. Why are they paying the same amount for a lesser thing ultimately and discrimination in the process? They also cared about democracy. They cared about the right to vote. Those things weren't kind of as siloed, I think, as they might feel now. For a black southerner a hundred years ago, democracy was definitely front of mind because it was fundamentally linked to public goods and material things.
The last point I'll say about this, because there's some research here in very interesting ways to make the point, of Ebonya Washington and a colleague at Yale did a paper a few years ago trying to measure what was the economic impact of the Voting Rights Act in the South. So linking this question of democracy to economic outcomes and the findings, shockingly, is in the places that were the most restrictive and exclusive in terms of excluding black people from the right to vote. Those places where citizens won the right to vote and were included into the electorate, which then expanded, those places were able to get more public goods and resources from their local and state governments because they had more voice in the system. So those two things for me are very much interrelated. And so, the democracy pushes have to go hand-in-hand with the campaigns around public goods and increasing people's sense of livelihood and creating what we might call the good life.
Alex Lovit:
Let me ask one more question about practical government policies that people feel in their lives. You've been an advocate, I think, for universal basic income.
Dorian Warren:
Yes.
Alex Lovit:
And the closest that this country ever got to that was the child tax credit expansion, as you mentioned, but also the stimulus checks during COVID that went to every American. That might not have been an ideally designed universal basic income program, but it kind of was that. Now, Donald Trump is promising to give $5,000 to every American if the Republicans retain control of Congress after this election. We could question whether that would actually happen, but it is a sort of a promise of, again, probably a pretty badly designed universal basic income. So is this horseshoe theory? I mean, how should we think about policies coming from the right that might be policies that the left would want?
Dorian Warren:
I'm not sure. One thought I have about it is, well, wow, we won because we took an idea that was on the margins of American politics, no matter the party affiliation, and now you have the sitting Presidents basically trying to promise checks. By the way, Donald Trump signed the first direct cash payments during the pandemic. And then, under the next administration in 2021, President Biden then extended those a couple times, including the child tax credit. So in many ways, the notion that the government should give direct cash to people has become bipartisan, which is interesting. So from a movement perspective, that's what you'd actually want to see. In a two-party system, the goal of any social movement and movement organizing is to set the agenda and force the decision makers, no matter who's in power, to act on your issue.
Now, having said that, there's always co-optation of an idea for personal or self-gain. And so that is the thing though that I'm worried about here is this is not serious. I come from Chicago, so I'm well aware of the history of patronage politics and corruption. It feels like just classic patronage politics, right, I'm going to pay you to vote for me in a sense. That's what it feels like. And so, how do we keep moving on the core idea of the issue and at the same time guard against co-optation and watering down? Because what the current President means by $5,000 checks is not what we mean. So let me take just one minute to say what I mean when I talk about guaranteed income. I mean the thing that actually fundamentally I think people deserve.
And I want to make two quick arguments on this. On the one hand, I think every American worker deserves an income floor in perpetuity as back pay for the loss of wages of the last 40 years in terms of their own productivity gain. So you have seen those charts, no doubt, that looks at productivity from 1947 to the present and looks at wages. Wages stayed flat, productivity is off the charts. What's in between, wages and the productivity gains, that's money owed to workers. That is value owed to workers. So I kind of look at it, dare I say it, almost from a reparations frame. It's like this is actually what's owed to people because we created the wealth of this country. Someone captured the value of the wealth that workers have created for 40, 50 years and people in rich oligarchs are still capturing that and it doesn't belong to them just by fiats. So that's one reason why I believe in income floor.
And then the second reason, it might be more controversial for some of your listeners, but I view it as a source of power. I view it as if you have an income floor, it might increase the probability of you having voice and exit at work, meaning if you had $500 a month or $1,000 a month, but you were in a really crappy job, you might be more willing to take a risk to say something at work, you might be willing to exit and go find another job. And to your point, Alex, we had a little natural experiment on this also during the pandemic. We gave out three rounds of cash payments. We had six months of child tax credit. You know what else happened during that period? Coincidentally, people quit a lot and employers were complaining they could not hire people. Oh my goodness. Well, if you can't hire people, that means you need to change your conditions. You need to maybe raise wages. You need to think differently about scheduling and the work-life balance that people, everybody wants.
The last thing I'll say about this, and when I started in this work of guaranteed income, there were no pilots. There are now over 200 in the last 10 years, guaranteed income pilots across the country. There is one finding that I'm so fascinated about. So there was a study of the Providence, Rhode Island guaranteed income pilot. It lasted over a year. I think it was around $500 a month. And what the finding is for the treatment group that was in the pilot that got the guaranteed income, they were much more likely to participate civically. Why? Because they had more time. They didn't have to take an extra shift maybe. When people have more time, when they feel like they frankly can breathe a little more, they're much more likely to participate in the democracy. And the finding of that study showed that a year after the pilot ended, the folks in the treatment group were, still a year after the thing ended, much more likely to participate because civic participation is habit-forming.
So that's a long way of saying I think there are multiple benefits to the idea of guaranteed income and an income floor, both partly because it's what's owed to workers, partly because it increases worker power and voice, and then partly because at least early findings show that it increases civic engagement and who would be against that.
Alex Lovit:
One objection that people often have to the idea of guaranteed income and to those checks was it goes to people that really need it. Elon Musk also gets a check. What would an ideally, if we're talking about a badly designed guaranteed income program under what Trump is promising, what does a well-designed guaranteed income program look like?
Dorian Warren:
That's such a good question. And so two quick thoughts on this. One is I'm okay with Elon Musk getting guaranteed income. If it's $1,000, let's say it's $1,000 a month, we should just tax it back. Simple solution. He doesn't pay any taxes last time I checked or he pays very little. That's absurd just by itself because it's as if he created all this wealth with no public infrastructure. We created the conditions as taxpayers for him to be rich, so we should tax back part of what we contributed to his earnings.
The second thing I'd say here is what we've learned in the American context and the challenges of a multiracial society that is still very, very racist, still very sexist, still has notions of who deserves what and who does not, I do think you have to do universal programs to get political buy-in just as a general principle. To get at equity questions and questions of injustice within a universal program, you can still have targeted things for people with certain kinds of disadvantage. And so why not have a guaranteed income for everybody or a universal basic income for everybody and maybe people under a certain income threshold get $100 more a month than people that make a million dollars? We could walk around that as a design, but all that to say, there's lots of different design options to the objections that people have, we can figure this out. I like to say it's not rocket science, it's just political science.
Alex Lovit:
Well, which is pretty hard.
Dorian Warren:
Yes.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so we started on a note of optimism, which I love. And so, let's close with some optimism as well. I think a lot of folks, myself included, are feeling a little, like I said at the beginning, I'm feeling a little panicked right now. I'm reading and thinking a lot about terrible outcomes that could befall this country. Paint us a picture of what this country could look like in 5, 10 years if we do collectively organize for some of these programs, some of these benefits we're talking about.
Dorian Warren:
To put it simply, we all can have a good life and we all can have nice things. I think that is what the country could look like. We don't have to fight or hate each other. We don't have to like everybody. I'm not saying kumbaya, but in a democracy, you have to live with people who might not agree with you on everything, who might look different from you, who might share different values. And so, I am still a deep believer in a multiracial democracy in this country. I have to, given my own family history, I can trace my family back to one of those enslaved people who ran off a plantation and enlisted. I've recently found his records in the archives-
Alex Lovit:
That's awesome.
Dorian Warren:
... who enlisted and risked everything to fight for freedom. And if my ancestor, my grandfather many generations back can do that, certainly I can play my role in trying to make the world a bit better for my children. It's also, I feel like a duty, an obligation I have because I've inherited, we've all inherited the fruits of previous struggles of people risking a hell of a lot to make this country more democratic and more just.
And maybe the other thing I'd say here, Alex, is, and I said this earlier, I do think the Third Reconstruction is already here. I think we're already in it. Might not feel like it. As I mentioned before, in some of our cities that are still under military occupation, definitely doesn't feel like it, but between childcare in New Mexico and what's going to happen in Minnesota next year with childcare and lots of organizing of campaigns just around the country, I feel we are probably in the midst of a period of deepening civic engagement that when historians like you look back in 20 years, you're going to say, "Oh, wow, there is this period of authoritarian and oligarchic rule. And much like other previous transformative moments in American history, people organized, people protested, people voted, people did a range of things to say no more," whether they drew inspiration from the populist or the suffragist or the Black Freedom Movement or the gay rights movement or pick your movement, people have always come together.
People have always organized, people have always taken risks. People have always changed this country in fundamental and transformative ways, and we are in that tradition. And so given that, I am super optimistic about what we're in the midst of, even though it feels crappy most days, but I also have that faith and that hope that I talked about that there are better things to come and we have some power to make that so.
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. And so if that history book is written, most of our names won't be in there, but we can be part of changing that story.
Dorian Warren:
That's right.
Alex Lovit:
Well, that's a great note to end on.
Dorian Warren, thank you for joining me on The Context.
Dorian Warren:
Thank you so much for inviting me and for having me on, Alex. It's been a pleasure.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich.
We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.
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I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering.
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