CHICAGO — University of Illinois Chicago professor Dick Simpson has lived a life in Chicago’s political and academic spheres for more than 50 years: 44th Ward alderman from 1971-1979; executive board member of the Illinois Political Science Association, a former congressional candidate, political consultant, author and has served on transition teams that advised elected officials such as former Mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington and is a campaign contributor to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Simpson, an advocate for good government, has a latest work, “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View From Chicago,” that gives a picture of the systemic forces tearing America’s democracy apart. In it, Simpson uses Chicago as a micro lens to delve into macro, national problems such as money in politics, low voter participation, political corruption (how the racial, economic, and social inequalities dividing the nation play out in our neighborhoods and cities). The book offers more than two dozen recommendations for reform, challenging changes that will not be easy or quick. A few of Simpson’s suggestions:
— Expanding the electorate through nationwide automatic voter registration, expanded early and mail-in voting access, the eventual addition of online voting technology and a system of unbiased redistricting.
— Policies designed to rebuild the middle class, including adoption of a fairer tax system that allows the re-emergence of a middle class.
— Prioritizing civics education in K-12 curriculum focused on instilling a sense of selfless, civic-minded behavior.
We talked with Simpson about his book and his thoughts on recent corruption scandals, a week before the 100th birthday celebration of Harold Washington. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: You’ve been in the political space for so long, how do you keep your optimism alive and well?
A: It’s partly because I’ve been through so many changes. I started out in the Richard J. Daley era in Chicago and led the opposition bloc in the City Council back then to Daley and Bilandic who followed him. I lived through Council Wars and all the ups and downs with the mayors and the City Councils since and at the national level. I started out as state campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy. We had, at the time, a theory that we would elect a president and everything would trickle down and democracy and justice would flourish and that turned out to be wrong. So, we started at the bottom and worked our way back the other direction.
Q: Did you have an audience in mind for this book?
A: It was written for everybody who might want to fight to preserve and enhance our democracy. On the one hand, I had in mind people who were in high school and several years from now, those who might be entering college and taking up for the first time, these issues. I was thinking of senior citizens who are retired and looking for something to do and all the people in between. I’m hoping it’ll have a shelf life of several years and be able to orient people to the bigger picture. Most scholars understand one area — they might know something about corruption here in Illinois, or they might know something about the problems of polarization during the Trump era and so forth. But they rarely see how it all interrelates and how these different crises all reinforce each other. And likewise, how people who are going to try and change the system, while they might work on one problem, they need to be aware of all the problems.
Q: Do you think people need to be reminded how democracy can be better, how it needs to be better? Or is it just that people think they have an idea about democracy, and don’t really know the truth of it?
A: We don’t really have an owner’s manual for our democracy. Athenians thought you learn democracy by doing democracy. And that’s why civic engagement education is so important. I wanted to better equip people to understand what to do, whichever problem or whichever side of the issue they wanted. What I see is necessary is a broad social movement that attempts to reestablish a more participatory democracy at the local level in Chicago. That would mean creating neighborhood-level governments to be part of the system and at the broader level, to help create a new deliberative system so that the representatives in Congress, for instance, who represent 750,000 people, would be better able to know how to represent those people. There are mechanisms that have been developed and experiments which have been made which show how that can be done, but it won’t happen unless there’s a demand for democracy.
Q: And the demand, do you think people have just gotten complacent? The machine has been going for so long, what is the alternative?
A: I think people start out with what might be called prejudices in the broadest sense of the word, prejudgments. And if they really understood the problem of money in politics, and how it is destroying our democracy — the dark money, the campaign financing by billionaires and millionaires — they would be willing to let their tax dollars be used to fund campaigns. We’ve had experiments in New York City and Maine and Minneapolis, and so forth. So, it’s not like we’re flying blind. In the scholarly sense, we know what to do. But the public doesn’t understand why the problem exists the way it does. They just get the sound bite, the headline. They don’t understand that this is a real crisis. And there are real things that need to be done and it can only be done if the public will demand it and support it. We need to practice a little democracy ourselves, instituting more vigorous neighborhood government would be a good thing in Chicago. It’s a matter of not just having a momentary spurred demonstration or a single event, but how do we institutionalize and make legal the systems of participation and liberation, which are necessary to a 21st century democracy? Something we haven’t yet built.
Q: Reading all the corruption history that is part of Chicago, the 1000s of folks indicted, were you surprised when former Ald. Edward Burke and former Speaker of the House Mike Madigan were indicted or was it a matter of time when the truth would reveal itself?
A: Well, it’s never quite known. We’ve had in Illinois, by this year more than 2,200 people go to federal prison for political corruption. And four of the last 10 governors have gone to jail. 37 of the aldermen have already been convicted in federal court. So, the fact that we have three major scandals at the moment, the Ald. Edward Burke scandal, the ComEd scandal around Madigan and the suburban red-light scandal around Madigan’s friends is not surprising. It is disappointing.
Q: There are so many recommendations in the book. Is there one recommendation that’s closer to realization than the others?
A: The one we’ve managed to do in Illinois is to require civic engagement education — it’s actually how do you vote? How do you contact public officials and so forth? It’s actual practice of democracy, not just the preaching of democracy. That’s now required by law in Illinois and a new curriculum has been invented for that. At the national level, there is a bill pending called Civics Secures Democracy, which would make civic engagement education on par with STEM education for science and engineering. And would be funded with billions of dollars that make it happen throughout the country. That hasn’t passed yet, but it does have support from both Democrats and Republicans. In terms of the most important single step, I think it’s campaign finance reform. Because if only billionaires or people who have the support of wealthy individuals or the wealthy corporations can run for public office, then we lose the quality of candidates we need, and citizens lose their faith in the government. The book has 25 things we need to do. We can’t all work on all of them, but we can each take one area. We need to create a social movement that demands more participatory democracy at the local level. And more deliberative democracy at the national level.
Q: You mention we must have a movement of change comparable to the abolitionist movement before the Civil War or the civil rights movement. Do you think the Black Lives Matter movement is that movement, or do we need something else?
A: I think the Black Lives Matter movement is a part of that. But I don’t think it’s sufficient because Black Lives Matter is focused on justice and equity issues, which are terribly important, but they’re not focused on participatory democracy or the institutions of democracy. Black Lives Matter could fit well within a movement, but they can’t be the sole movement if we’re going to reconstruct democracy. There are a lot of people who are struggling to bring about reforms in their community and struggling to bring reforms nationally to end gerrymandering or institute term limits — whatever part of the reform agenda, it’s yet to fully coalesce. And my hope is that maybe the book could be helpful in people beginning to create such a movement.
Q: You cite, in the book, three conditions for success of social and political movements for change are “widespread agreement that we have serious problems”; these problems are understood as “failures of government”; and “enough people ... care enough about these problems to devote a lot of time and energy to bring about change.” Why do you think your recommendations will work?
A: One of the reasons is that we have reached such crisis proportions. We made leaps forward after Richard Nixon and Watergate. We made some modest steps forward on ethics after Gov. Rod Blagojevich was convicted. With the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, exposing how serious this is, that democracy itself is on the line, I am hopeful that there will be a renewed enthusiasm to make changes and that people will be willing to make the effort personally, to bring the changes about.
