Fmr. Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA):
It's — I share the concerns and the gravity of concerns that my friends here have described.
It's amazing how it feels it has declined so rapidly since I left office in early 2015, because, at that time, it seemed to me there was still an appetite for the kind of governing that said you didn't have to agree on everything before you worked together on anything at all.
I still think that appetite exists in regular people. I think that our politics have become so performative now, radical for attention's sake. And the danger, of course, is that that leadership is internalized by lots of people. You mentioned the issue of political violence. The language is careless, and the actions that are taken, including up to January 6, are pretty scary.
But I will say this. I think we have two interrelated challenges to our democracy. One is how to make it function, right, how to make the rules and the systems straightforward, so that you can get registered, stay registered, vote, have that vote counted. The hyperpartisan gerrymandering, the amount of money in our politics and policymaking, all of these have solutions. There are good ideas out there, lots of people working on them. They are important.
But there's another challenge. It's not the same. And I think this is the one I feel like we have been touching on. And that is how to make our democracy meaningful, meaning, how is it that folks feel like the democracy delivers for them?
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