Accidental Gods
Seeing Round Corners: Upgrading Democracy with Suzette Masters and Dr John Izzo
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So I think the truth is we've got to do lots of bottoms-up experimenting. But the second thing is I don't think this change will truly happen until we also have it from the top. And what I mean is at some point, someone's going to run on a platform like that.
Someone's going to say, I want to create a different kind of democracy, a different kind of dialogue that involves you, where we come together to think about the future. And maybe that creates a milieu where a new kind of leader could appeal to what people have started to experience themselves. That's why I think it has to happen at both ends.
How do we want to live together? How do we safeguard our collective futures? And I think one of the biggest challenges, though, that I think is going to be particularly difficult to tackle in the U.S. is we need policies that are in our collective self-interest. but we are in an immensely individualistic country. And that's the nut to crack in the US.
Because we don't have a strong tradition of collectivism.
Hey people.
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Chapter 2: How do we envision a new kind of democracy?
Happy New Year, or Happy Hogmanay if you're north of the border between Scotland and England. And welcome to Accidental Gods once again. We are heading into our seventh year of weekly episodes, which feels remarkably good. And yes, we are still the podcast that believes another world is possible. Although, at the time of recording, the wind out there is suggesting...
that the whole world might blow away by tomorrow. However, if you hear this, it didn't. And so, we do still believe that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility.
And this year, we are really going to be looking at Thrutopian route maps that will take us from where we are towards that future that we would be proud to leave behind. And pretty much the only thing that we all agree on, wherever we are on any of the spectrums of tribal division, is that the current system is not what we need. It's not working for us.
It may be working for the very, very, very tiny number of people right at the top who I sincerely doubt ever have or ever will listen to this podcast, but it's not working for anybody else. I think the system is doing exactly what it was always designed to do, which is to enrich a very few at the top. However, it is absolutely not fit for purpose.
And so then one of the questions that we will be wrestling with a lot in the coming year is how do we replace this? And that takes two things. It takes a vision of what we could do and a mechanism of replacement that is without question peaceful. Using force to solve our problems is the very definition of the old paradigm.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do we face in safeguarding our collective futures?
And if we are going to emerge into a new system, if we are going to consciously evolve, then we need not to be doing that. So this week we're talking to two people who spend their entire lives imagining how things might be different, particularly in the US, where even the pretense of democracy has quite clearly been abandoned. Dr John Izzo is a friend of the podcast.
He was once an ordained minister in a Presbyterian church. Now he's a best-selling author, speaker and thought leader focused on social responsibility and intergenerational integration. He's a board member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action Group
And most notably, in terms of what we're talking about here, he's co-host of the Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast, which is particularly focused at people over 50 who are interested in finding ways to a regenerative future. And last April, so nearly a year ago, I heard him speaking to our second guest, Suzette Brooks Masters.
Suzette describes herself as a sometime Cassandra who sees around the corner. She's a serial social entrepreneur with a long track record of creating positive change in our society on a wide range of issues. She has a BA and a master's in economics from Amherst College and Cambridge, respectively. And that's Cambridge in the UK, not one of the many in the US.
And she has a law degree from Harvard. Even given all of that, she has spent a great deal of her working life as a strategist, working in the fields of expanding democracy. And she is currently co-chair and co-founder of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance and an advisor to Assemble the Field.
And both of these are explicitly involved in finding new ways forward, new ways to shape a genuinely democratic system to replace the kleptocracy that we have at the moment. It is a foundational axiom of this podcast that we have the best democracy that money can buy and that this is not a good thing.
And apart from the fact that it means we need to change the entire economic system, it also means we need to change our governance model. We need a whole new way of doing politics, of imagining how to bring power to those with wisdom and, if remotely possible, wisdom to those with power, although I kind of doubt the second one is ever going to happen.
So how do we find agency and give agency and share agency and bring the collective wisdom of humanity to bear on the problems of the moment? So that's where we're going. As we step into the new year, people of the podcast, please welcome Suzette Brook-Masters and Dr. John Izzo, exploring the nature of governance and democracy.
Suzette Masters and John Izzo, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. John, in your case, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you now that we're heading into the new year?
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Chapter 4: How can we experiment with new governance models?
You just put off several cohorts of people. But I'm glad you're well and BC must be lovely this time of year. Suzette, how are you and where are you? And it's seeming you're not just recovering from surgery.
No, hello. Lovely to be here. I am currently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I am spending more time because I am a new grandmother. Oh, congratulations. And so I'm splitting my time between New York City, where I'm from and where I live, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yay. Yes, I speak as a not-grandma, but my wife is a grandma, and it's wonderful watching her have all the wonderful bits of... being an adult with a child without having as many of the quite difficult bits. It's grand. And of course, this is what community is all about, is the many generations helping to care for the young so that it's not all loaded onto a few people. Well done. Yay. Alrighty.
So I came across Suzette a listening to John's podcast way back in, I think it was April. Yes, 21st of April, Redesigning Democracy, Future Generations at the Table on the WayForward Regenerative podcast. And that was recorded, I'm assuming, a while before it came out. And we were in the early days of, what are we going to call it?
Let's just call it the Trump presidency because that saves us being bleeped out for anything. And now we're nearly a year into... into the march of authoritarianism, which in some ways has gone a lot faster than I think any of us feared, but in other ways has found itself bogged down more deeply than any of us hoped, I think.
And certainly looking from the outside, we are seeing uprisings of resistance that are so full of courage and creativity and so heartening to watch. So I would like to ask both of you, starting with Suzette,
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Chapter 5: What role does technology play in enhancing civic engagement?
If you are able to construct a route forward to a democracy that actually works, What is the best that you could imagine and how would we get there? Suzette, we'll ask John the same in a bit.
Wow. You're starting with the really easy questions at very early hour. It is true what you say, that things have gone faster and been more extreme than many people feared. And I think a lot of people who voted in Trump didn't even really understand what they were enabling and
And I don't pretend to have a silver bullet, but I think that the roots of fighting authoritarianism successfully will combine ways of getting people to connect with other people in common purpose that feels authentic. And that feels like it can actually change the way they live their lives where they live. So I think there's a lot that's written theoretically about new systems, ways of being.
But I think at the end of the day, it's going to be real people in real places coming together. to solve real problems, and then to use that as a way to build up their confidence in their fellow humans, their neighbors, testing out new ways of bringing people together that use technology that enables more people to provide input.
And for the government, which I believe is a crucial actor here, at all levels, But now, more than ever, with a weaponized federal government, I would say state and local. I would say the emphasis on the local first, where there's more of a sense of shared reality.
But I think the success is going to be in developing ways of practicing democracy, not just theorizing about democracy or systems, but actually doing it with people And then figuring out whether that can rebuild trust in government to do the right thing once they receive that input. I know that's very convoluted.
I really believe we need to take it all down a notch or two or three to real things that real people can do. Because I think in this moment, The theory just isn't going to get us there. You know, like even though I think a lot of the new ideas are rooted in theory, I think we have to practice them and then learn from the practice and then replicate the practice. And hopefully that will scale.
And I think it's everything from deliberative democracy experiments that are happening locally, participatory budgeting, you know, all the things that can really happen at the local level with all these new forms of tech enablement. And I think it's also local organizing, as you began at the beginning, getting people together to do things together that are a joyful experience.
form of resistance that celebrates what they have in common while fighting at the same time. Because it's scary right now. And then I'll stop. But I think what's scariest now and what I feel most strongly is that feeling of invincibility that I had knowing that whatever I was going to protest about or
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Chapter 6: How can we ensure the voices of the community are heard?
And that is gone. Yeah, that is gone. And and, you know, whatever you want to call that, whether that's authoritarianism or just plain old repression or the end of freedom of speech in America, you know, I don't know.
It doesn't matter what we call it. The reality is the fear.
But the reality is that we have to think about the risks that we're willing to take to do the most basic things that we used to take for granted. And that's across different regimes, different political parties. We are now in a weaponized world. a different state of affairs where people are hunting people down who are perceived as enemies of the system and due process doesn't matter.
It's really terrifying. So I think these forms of community building solidarity that are twisting and skirting the usual way that people could track you down as enemies of the system are going to be really important. And we're figuring out what that looks like in real time.
Yeah. In real time. Yeah. Okay. I'll stop there. That's a whole podcast just there, Suzette. There's so many things I want to follow up on there, but let's move to John. And building on what Suzette just said, can I ask from you, what is a fully functioning democracy? If we were to move forward, let's lay on the table. I don't think any Western power has ever actually had a democracy.
They've had a kleptocracy that has masqueraded as a democracy. And actually, its function was to make sure that the minimal amount of democracy took place. And most people's opinions were never taken into account. We had the best democracy money could buy and a lot of people with the money got what they wanted. And now the people with the money are getting exactly what they want.
And it seems to me that power is shifting very fast from the political and industrial business class to the tech business class, who also own the information management. And the bringing together of all of the data, of all of the things, of all of the people, means it's a lot easier to know who's doing what.
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Chapter 7: What are the values we need to foster a flourishing democracy?
including this podcast, probably. So if you feel that we're likely to be weaponized for anything we say, we will cut it out before it goes live, although it's probably too late because we're on Zoom.
So, John, if we were to imagine in theory, based on what Suzette's just said about building from the ground up, local and layers up, participatory democracy, participatory budgeting, distributed levels of decision making, what does a really functioning democracy look really look like if we were able to get there?
Well, yeah, thank you. And thanks, Suzette. And I'll come back. I do want to say a word about my perception of what's happening in the Trump kingdom now. Maybe I'll start there because I think it's a good context for that question. Yeah. I just read a wonderful book I recommend highly called How Democracies Die. Mm-hmm.
which really looks at not just in the United States, but really the path that democracies often take in dying. And one of the interesting points that they make in the book, I thought one of those profound points, is that we think that most democracies die from military takeovers.
But in fact, most democracies that have died, or at least, you know, really diminished themselves, happened first with people who were popularly elected. which was true in Venezuela, which was true in Russia. Germany. Which was true in many places across the globe, Hungary, et cetera. And so I think the first thing is, one of the things, it was written during the first Trump administration.
And it almost seems now like a warm fairy tale because they didn't know what was coming in the second term. And I think what we saw is in the first term, Donald Trump was mostly inept and a bit kooky. He really didn't have a strong driving force in terms of what he was trying to accomplish. This term is radically different. First of all, he came with the revenge tour.
One has to understand that almost everything that Donald Trump does is motivated by personal grievance. So I even believe his anti-green energy is mostly because people who hate him Love green energy. So one has to understand that grievance is his primary driving force.
But behind him are people who have much more sinister intentions, which is to undermine democracy as we know it and to put power in the hands of a very really a minority of Americans to tell the majority of Americans what to do.
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Chapter 8: How can we shift from individualism to collective action?
Now, I want to say one hopeful thing. I recently heard Al Gore talking about, you know, the Trump era. And he said, I believe we are just past peak Trump. And I do believe in America, we are just past peak Trump, not in this sense, because what Suzette said is true.
The things they're doing, especially around dissent and hunting people down and immigration and trying to really close off America against the world and all dissent is very dangerous and very frightening. However, I believe Gore is right. To the American people, we're kind of past peak Trump.
That if you look at the polling and you look at how people actually feel about Donald Trump and what's happening, is that the erosion of their majority is going on. Now, back to functioning democracy. To have a functioning democracy, you have to, first of all, have the rule of law. You have to have an even playing field where the people can express their deepest desires.
And, you know, Peter Senge, one of my mentors who wrote The Fifth Discipline, said that, you know, you have a system problem when the outcomes the system produces are not what the individuals in the system would want. So what we have now is the system, whether it's the Supreme Court's affirmation of gerrymandering, which both sides do, but the Republicans are doing now squared.
If you look at what they're doing in terms of due process, et cetera. So what you have right now is the system is rigged against even the majority of Americans who no longer believe in most of what Trump is doing. And so I think you have to have the rule of law. And that's one of the things that's breaking down in the United States.
And that is always the first thing that goes when a democracy dies is the rule of law. Now, the good news is, and then I'll stop, is that if you look at the last elections in Virginia and New Jersey, as John Kasich, who is the last Republican standing against Trump the first time, God bless him for just his deep humanity. As John Kasich said, America is basically a centrist country.
And he said what those elections showed is that if there's a fair election, Americans will go back towards the center. And I do believe that. So I think the real battle is going to be making sure the elections stay fair and that the courts uphold that. We unfortunately have a Supreme Court now on both sides that is no longer a jurisprudence because almost every decision is 6-3.
That tells you the system is broken because people are not voting based on the law. They're voting based on their political persuasion. Finally, I'll say one more thing. You know, the founders of the U.S. Constitution were deeply afraid of tyranny. Most people don't know they were also deeply afraid of democracy.
That's why if you look at the original US Constitution, all kinds of guards against the people, because they were afraid that a demagogue could mislead people. and lead them in the wrong direction. Of course, their very fear happened here. That's why freedom of the press was so important to them and freedom of speech.
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