Latest work. All after words programs are available as podcasts. Host its perfect to be with you. I know we talked at the university of california Washington Center several years ago but its nice to see you again and your book, breaking the twoparty doom loop weaves history, Political Science and concrete reforms together and they really for knitting way and in a way that really resonated with me and was a pleasure to read. Its an important book. To pull back a little bit and ask why do you want to write about Political Parties because i know the first book was focused on lobbying. And in th a universe of potentil reform, the electoral college, one of the biggest ones money and politics you chose to focus on th parties as a linchpin. Can you talk about what drew you to the parties and the process . Guest why did i write this book . Because i was worried about american democracy and i saw a hyper partisan ship as a serious problem in the country and wanted to think about if there was some way to solve the problem. Iif kind of flowed in an indiret way about the growth of corporate lobbying and in that book i concluded on one one reay they uselobbyist were so powerfn washington, d. C. Was because essentially they broke a lot of the walls because there wasnt a tremendous amount of expertise and now on capitol hill because they turned over at such a high a rate anrate and congress didnt in it. It makes total sense and one reason it didnt happen is becausbecause if it becomes a centralized and i also realized adding more staff wouldnt solve the problem of hyper partisanship in congress in a way in which nothing gets done because theres so much gridlock except for the moments when to muctwomuch gets it done and i re the problem of the democracy at this moment is the fact we have two distinct National Parties. American political history goes back more than two centuries and talk about how the framers in invision the factions and parties that they saw and why this is such a departure. Lets start with the framers because that is where this political history starts. Succumb to framers were engaging in this system of selfgovernance and they thought Political Parties were Dangerous Things as they read their history of ancient rome and greece and republic and they saw the civil war was a threat to the selfgovernment and basil the civil war happens when it got split into it and there were two parties involved in what would happeoften whatwould happe its power to press the Minority Party and so they thought that they were going to come up with a system of government that would make it very hard for the parties to form. They were going to have three branches of government on top of the federal and that made it hard for the party to form at least in a coherent way. Thats one of the reasons american parties have been weak and incoherent until recent times because of parties for state and local. In recent years it has been truly nationalized and we have the nationalized parties that are genuinely distinct and represent genuine values and visions of america and we have a zero sum partisanship which is the thing that the framers feared. Host going back a little bit, but twoparty system essentially has survived for a century. Why has it endured and then we will get to the hyper partisan development and the kind of contemporary piece but historically it seems to have evolved into these parties seem to have been responsive to the National Crisis so i would like to hear a little bit more. Essentially we had a multiparty system that the parties themselves were these broad overlapping coalitions so that they were more flexible at the governing level in congress you could build different coalitions based on different issues across the parties that often the local political identity was more important than the National Political identity and that also allowed for a lot of politics that helped grease the wheels of the legislative process. I think in the era in which the local concerns were more it was just easier to build different coalitions of different kinds and now because they have become so distinct and they are both competing for this narrow but elusive compromise Coalition Building that the system of government depends on no longer works. Host we will get to the Solutions Later on in the conversation about the naturalization of the Political Parties. One thing that struck me sticking with Historical Development o piece, one thing that struck me is where our politics more in payroll during the earlier eras in the past century say during the Great Depression or the 1960s when of course we have scores of urban riots, protests, political leaders and Police Demonstrators outside the Democratic Convention in chicago. Im wondering if looking back you solve democracy under greater threat in the 30s to 60s than it is today and tell you whahowyou what kind of place parties in those earlier eras. Guest lets start with the 60s. An idea of violence isnt new. Maybe the idea that there was a peaceful age of politics it had always been nasty and timed a little while and but what was different i as the conflict over the civil rights were not hyper partisan. They were fought more within the party then between the party so in the civil rights bill there was a High Percentage of the republican members of Congress Voting for the major civil rights bill before they came to him that. So, what it meant is that these were difficult conflicts and certainly there were people that lost their lives in these conflicts. They didnt threaten the fundamental stability of the system because they didnt create a condition in which everything was at stake which is the situation we are in now creating these emotional politics and bifurcation of the country into two entirely distinct political coalitions undermining the basic legitimacy and fairness on which the system of democracy has to depend on and that is a fundamental challenge. The 30s was also a challenging time and there were a lot of folks that thought democracy had come to its head and perhaps since 1932 it turned out differently. All of which should remind us of selfgovernance and democracy is nothing we should take for granted that is a somewhat fragile thing and we have to think hard if we want to continue it. Host you describe a four party system, two parties within each party. My question though was there a bargain made on the issue of race and civil rights that the parties agreed for a number of decades to push the issue of jim crow and racial segregation aside to have these kind of harmonious and potential because once of course the civil rights was introduced, certainly in the south and isouth and in the norn particular they were high enough it was true for africanamericans is well. Guest in the 50s and 60s of course that comes from this was based on the exclusion of civil rights in the stage and the continuation of the jim crow south and politics and they have to have these conflicts we just have to figure out how to have them in a way that it set in motion the politics along the cultural and social identity lines which we now have the experience and culmination of. We did have Something Like a functioning four party system alongside liberal democrats and republicans and it wasnt perfect but in retrospect it meant you could build different coalitions in congress and congress i think it has been seen as much power to the executive branch as it has now. For a lot of the voters they didnt really stand for anything but at the functional level i think it worked pretty well and ultimately we ought to get back to Something Like that but with multiple parties so they can make the choices more clearly. Host you mentioned civil rights, so how do you explain the past several decades, how would you sum up especially in the 60s, 70s, 80s. The fractured media landscape that we hear so many pundits and scholars talk about, how would you explain the forces driving the rise of these National Parties in the binary polarization . You identified a few of them into the increasing salience at the National Level played a little bit into that as well. Thereve been two chapters in the book. In short, as americans became more prosperous, the pressing Economic Issues of the earlier era and the rising identity and cultural war politics and the parties took on more distinct and separate images so by the 1990s when the issues reached a level of national salience, democratic parties became more and these patterns and trends feed on themselves because they are more salient and the voters start identifying which party gets with the values better into the parties themselves change as liberal republicans disagree that it could disappear from the party and from the Democratic Party the National Identity of the party changed and the voters moved and shifted and thats what led to where we are today. Host you describ describe ie book and memo from Newt Gingrich who was the house speaker, the leader of the socalled republican revolution of 1994, and the memo was to the fellow republican colleagues how to describe democrats and im quoting from the memo from your book you recommended republicans use words to talk about democrats such as bizarre, destroy, devour, greed, pathetic shame and traders. Thats a pretty remarkable set of attributes. Does that kind of encapsulates a different level of rancor than even as we discuss it its alwas been bitter and brutal. Are they talking about something fundamentally new in the early 90s . Guest new90s . Guest Newt Gingrich did a lot of things. He encouraged his fellow republicans to talk in a much more aggressive way about democrats and also for the first time nationalized the election that ha had been run on local issues and gingrich noticed republicans kept winning for president although they lost in 92 but they were losing the Congressional Elections and he thought that the key was to emphasize these cultural themes that reagan had to some extent run on the. Gingrich is a complicated figure. He often becomes a caricature of everything was fine and then he took over and things went to hell but he was picking up on trends happening before and the only reason he came to power was there were a lot of republicans in the house that were tired of being in the minority and creating somebody that was more oppositional and the party had been the majority in the house for 40 years and they have grown a bit corrupt and there was an increasinglthat there wasan incg centralized leadership under speaker jim wright which a lot of republicans rebelled against because they felt like they were being cut out of the process which led to the rise of Newt Gingrich. I think he is an important player but he is a product of his time. Host the book is primarily about institution and gingrich probably in your rendering is more of a symptom. There is a reason that he emerged. I dont want to undervalue that particular time, but i think that they often overrate the role of the actors and transforming institutions when they are largely responded to pressure incentives and broad patterns. Host im going to get back to this but one of the things is to read the work on contemporary politics that isnt trump centric. Hes mentioned a couple of times but its quite refreshing given the litany of the stories and the focus on him. Getting back to the 90s and to bring us back to where we are today, you write that congress hasnt had a serious burst of lawmaking since 1990 and when i read that, part of me thought okay i know congress is functional. I used to work in congress with Richard Gephardt and the partisan warfare and at the same time enacted nafta, welfare reform, all of them we might disagree with but there certainly was that in the 90s. After 9 11, both parties seem to come together around Bipartisan National Security reform whether it is good or bad and then the passage of t. A. R. P. With response to the 2008 financial crisis so my question for the parties in the past two decades, have they been able to reach compromises and find a level of Common Ground especially in times of crisis or are these examples of exciting, really so exceptional to this toxic hyper partisan norm . Guest theres been a steady decline. I took about 1990s the major environmental Immigration Law and budget reform and americans with disabilities act which are all landmark legislation. Its not to say that there hasnt been a major Bipartisan Legislation since then but having four major bills in a year doesnt happen anymore and its been sputtering out since 2010 in which i would argue for the first time theres been a genuine twoparty system that is just basically nothing in terms of the Bipartisan Legislation the only legislation now that passes is the partisan legislation. Theres some stuff that passes in the criminal Justice Reform of 2018 that was something that its not if we are talking about the denominator which is the number of problems theyve called on to solve if we look at the enumerator it gets smaller and smaller. Host especially when it seems overwhelming that they support the common sense. The title of the book has this phrase to party doom loop. Can you talk about why it is so dire, why we cant escape this because as we know of course politics is never static. But it implies that there is a certain status that weve spiraled into a negative period in which there is no escape unless we have the fundamental prodemocracy reform. Guest so, what we have in this era is to distinct National Parties fighting over the zerosum conflict over the National Identity. If one party is democrat and has its corrine urban cosmopolitan america diverse multicultural knowledge economy and the traditional Christian America increasingly disconnected from the Global Knowledge economy and with two very different visions for governing america. Host the challenges they are in roughly equal power and democrats could win control of washington and republicans could win control of washington and we have had now going back to 1992 this longstanding era of pendulum politics for one party to the divided Government Back to divide, unified to the other and democrats may gain control after the 2020 election but they will probably only keep it for two years if they do. So, there is no the stakes are incredibly high an into ther in this era of trench warfare with no obvious resolution and both sides fear being in the minority and both sides think that they can win the majority, but it is a stalemate that neither side has any intention of ever backing down. And even to engage in political compromise is essentially to back down. So, it is just like you are stuck in a traffic jam and cant move because there are fundamental barriers. Host kind of like your Worst Nightmare being stuck in this endless cycle. Guest getting angrier and angrier and the forces in the system lead to more escalation is thas the states have gotten higher, people get more emotional about politics. You cant compromise on the other side people are cutting off friendships and more and more surrounding themselves with people who share their values and engage in information that reinforces themselves and now we have two sides that have fundamentally different relations to what is the true facts at this point. It was a kind of escape and won a number of state legislators that this had a kind of comic effect on some of the toxins. Guest sure if let out some of the steam, but its not a longterm solution that the majority isnt likely to be a permanent majority and once trump is out of office if of that energy will dissipate and then democrats will be disappointed with whoever they elect as president and will disengage. The big there are too many problems. One is there are a lot of pressing National Issues we have to deal with and state climate is probably the most important index essential that we are not dealing with it at all. And number two is this escalating hyper partisanship we are now fighting over a basic rule of who gets to vote and how the votes are counted. Host legitimacy. Guest democracy is always going to involve consensus or not th a political issue, but te challenge is we need to have a system by which we can agree that some set of rules are fair and some procedures are fair and they can abide by those outcomes and when things like elections are fundamentally called into question when we dont have any way to arbitrate disagreements, we dont have a democracy anymore. Host you write in the book that you are a democrat, but you say that the common argument that its really one party, the Republican Party that has become toto extremist, its gone off te rails, its become captured by the far right into that argument is these are deeper kind of systemic problems. Again this idea of the doom loop. Can you talk a little bit about why you think the arguments that democrats are right with moderates and liberals and people on the far left whereas republicans are really quite extreme. Guest republicans are a big party, too. I think that its flawed because first of all i do agree that the Republican Party has become incredibly extreme and by any historical or competitive standards the Republican Party has become an extreme party. But just to say democrats need to win the elections that doesnt solve the underlining ug hyper partisanship problem it just makes it worse. So although i may be a democrat and i may think that things would be better, i dont think that is a solution to the underlying structural problems and the reason the Republican Party has become so extreme is really fundamentally a function of the twoparty system because a lot of folks in the Republican Party who were certainly not on board with what trump stood for and where he wanted to take the party but they said you cant be a democrat so theres no other party. Slowly they have come along with him. If there were another party, theres a lot of republicans who would have long left and joined a different race or party. If you think about support in the primary, it probably got about 40 of people that are republicans or republican leaning in to pick up 30 in the primary that by 12 which is in line with a lot of the parties in europe so it seems reasonable. But because we have a twoparty system you can be in the plurality and gain total power so by winning the nomination they go go to redefine the party and a lot of the voters it was a binary choice. Ive got a lot of columns of folks that say i dont love trump but democrats are crazy so i guess i will have to vote for trump. And in that binary system i guess i will have to vote for the republicans. There is no alternative. Host folks on the right have come around and supported that exception. Guest hes the only game in town. Its so important that we have to stick with. The lesser of two evils is the defining logic. By the way, if you do a Google Search you wont find that much for it. You will find there is a movie they changed the name to two fifths of a warrior. Cynic that might be the name for the partisan politics. In terms of getting at is coming and we are going to get to the solutions in a moment, but why is it inconceivable that in 2021 saint trump loses and the republicans dust off the autopsy report and the party shifts. It becomes a more moderate party or it has a much bigger space for the more moderate policies on issues like climate change, immigration, even at some point taxes. Why does that seem so farfetched in your analysis . Guest the topic has shifted since 2012 that was a faction within the party and it was defeated. The Republican Party has now defined itself in opposition to immigration in the fighter for the traditional value and those are the folks that are the most active in the parties with the idea that theres all these folks active and powerful in the Republican Party they believe deeply in these values and probably think that they were cheated the reason they didnt win is because they didnt fight hard enough on their values because that is who was in charge of the party and those are the groups in the republican coalition, the idea that they would increase a completely different vision of what the party stands for seems to defy logic. That isnt the value of the Republican Party and they are not going to suddenly transform their values. Maybe if they lose four president ial elections in a row and become a minority in the dominant Democratic Politics than they might rethink it but i dont think that will happen anytime soon. Host one of the things i like about the book is that its not at all bleak. The first sort of half or two thirds is focused on the analysis. But youve got a solution section of recommendations you thought deeply. Id like to go through the case for reform an and at that that e subtitle for the democracy in america. Multiparty democracy that would be the chief advantages to having a multiparty democracy . Guest i think it actually shouldnt be seen as foreign for two reason. One i think we have a multiparty democracy in the u. S. For a long time but it was much more a again to that which we have now. Now i think that out of 2010 is the truly radical deviation. I also think if you look at what the framers were writing about, but they really didnt like was the twoparty system. I read madisons federalist number ten which is factions counteracting factions. The key to a stable democracy is fluid coalition that you have different factions building differendifferent maturities on different issues but you want to have a democracy so no group feels like its going to be in a permanent minority and it doesnt see the system as legitimate work as a permanent majority and therefore an opportunity to oppress the minority and that is fundamentally a vision of multiparty democracy in which different parties filled with different coalitions and if its more responsive or more fluid for the changing demands and concerns of the electorate. So it shouldnt seem that foreign to us its just we havent conceived of our political history in that way. I think that it has tremendous advantages. One obviously it breaks this binary politic is fundamentally about compromise and Coalition Building and vendor or some other advantages as well. One is that turnout is consistently higher because every vote matters whereas in the u. S. If you are not in the handful of swing states, your vote doesnt matter and moreover youre more likely to find a candidate or party that you feel it speaks to you. Why do we have such low voter turnout weve made it much easier to vote notwithstanding some backsliding in the states and the voter turnout goes up a little bit. Ththeyve written off large pars of the countrys whereas if every vote matters you are more likely to vote and parties will go after the vote. Also gerrymandering is only a function of the twopart system of the single formality. Its a uniquely american problem and if you have more parties and larger districts which you would need to get more parties the gerrymandering goes away because you dont have a way to run the complex algorithms. Host can you talk about some of the other reforms . Longtime member house districts, how would these be better . V. Representation the system we have now of the plurality is somewhat unique in the world where theres only a handful of countries that use it. Most have moved over the course of the century to the proportional representation ands many types of representation. It is the sort of hyper pr that generates too many parties, too much fracture. What i envision for the u. S. Is something what i would call honest multiparty. Its a system that ireland uses in australia. Rather than having a Single Member district coming to combine them and have five representatives so you dont have to get a plurality of the votes that you actually wind up having to get about 17 of the vote if you use a system that the irish use which is in the member districts. Host can you give us an example of i dont know, nebraska, oklahoma. Guest i thin guest i think that they have five congressional. Oklahoma is probably 60 republican and there was one democrat that one this year just barely so democrats or liberals should have 40 of the seats that is a Fair Distribution if you have one multimember district. If you have the multimember districts you have more than two parties because now they can compete without having to win a majority so you might have a party that is more like a social Democratic Party like you think bernie sanders, the more moderate party like joe biden and you might have different Republican Party is i would say and they are doing a party split into three when it is that is t of moderate republican reform and one that of the more tradil Christian Conservative freemarket party and then one thats like the Trump America first. Host so you see the biggest constituencies. They are based on the parties offered but theres nothing sacred about having just the two parties. I appreciate the electoral rules and system most of it is not set in stone. It was so refreshing to read about the shift in electoral democracy. Can you talk about why we dont have to be bound up by two parties. Its not necessarily guest the only reason we have the two parties is because of a system that tends into the framers were unthinkingly importing it from the british. That is just how we vote. Thereve been tremendous innovations in electoral rules there was a period in the 1830s and 40s when a lot of the states moved the single bloc voting at large which is probably the only thing worse than the plurality voting because if you have 60 of support in the state. Democrats have 60 of the state then they can win all ten seats they should win a 60 wind up 60s is not when they started doing this in the 1830s. The constitution says they can do what they want with their voting rolls and host talk about the rank voting because that is unfamiliar to me and most other people. Guest it is a system thats been used in australia for a little over 100 years, ireland and to other countries. It gets eliminated and folks get transferred so its like having a backup vote having this ability but also encourages more Coalition Building that might not be the first choice but i would like to be the second choice into cities have adapted to see less negative campaigning and voters tend to like that so its a way to reduce polarization and it would need to ge delete democracy. Host let me play devils advocate for a second. All of the reforms as you know most of them have unintended consequences three things that we cant now some democratic reforms have advanced democracy like the Voting Rights act in 1965. Others though seem quite flawedd and retrospectives of thinking about the California Initiative to. Campaignfinance reform in the 1970s and again in 2000 the rhetoric around th around thoseo outpace the reality so they dont deliver on the promise, it doesnt seem to curb the influence of big money and politics. Talk to us a little about what you think could go wrong with the save american democracy act and what would be some of the unintended consequences you might worry about if this were to pass. Guest to maintain the status quo is important to have a realistic view of democracy. It isnt something solved. Its always going to be messy and for me its to try to solve the most pressing problems at a particular moment and think about changes we have experience with, so the multiparty democracy, again not a radical idea as most advanced democracies in the world boast of stable Coalition Government but even reforms. At the time they were trying to solve a particular problem. You go back to the progressive era and others concentrated power both are totally brought by the wealthy industrialists and what do we do about that . We take power away from them because they dont seem to be representing the people very well. Now there was a leak in business that advocated and there were 24 cities that did move to the form including new york city and i think it worked pretty well but then the two parties kind of shut it down. Democracy isnt a thing to be solved. Therethis unintended consequens that we have to weigh out whats worse, letting things continue as they are but seems destructive and harmful or solving what is the biggest problem now and maybe a generation from now there will be problems that the reformers will need to solve and we will deal with those then but we have to allow the democracy to continue to solve problems in the future. Host because you are a senior fellow at the new america, they have an interest in seeing some of their ideas but some of their ideas come into action. Can you talk about the mechanics of implementing the changes and how would these reforms actually get it done and then beyond the book are there steps that you and or new america and again not to link them together, but they might take to promote your reform ideas. Guest it will probably be on the ballot in 2020 in alaska so theres a lot of energy already out around the Electoral Reform and the states can change how they elect their legislature individually it will happen at the National Level. Theres even been a bill introduced that would put in place the multimember district. Theyd reform is never easy but we are at a moment in which americans are really frustrated with how the political system works and two thirds of americans say they would like more they are choosing not to affiliate. We are seeing the breakout of a lot of things that we sort of thought of as just unchallenging freetrade, i think its changed a lot of things and its changing the social hierarchy and although the presidency has done a lot of damage, i think its also cleared away a lot of assumptions that worked pretty well and i think its woken up a lot of people beside you that maybe theres a crisis in the democracy that we ought to reform. Thinking about american political history, there is a pattern of crisis and renewal of the revolutionary war, the progressive era, Civil Rights Era host and they reflect that. Guest weve had these moments where it seems like something is broken and then we make democracy more inclusive and responsive and functional and create new problems for another year to resolve problems of that era. Host even the parties in power if they see this as being harmful to their interest, how does one get the two parties now to sign off on support legislation that abolishes them in some ways and breaks them up . They will get attention thatn that way but i think that one, reform happens when theres folks that demanded and frankly there are a lot of politicians who i think are really frustrated with being trapped in the system and they feel like they are just soldiers in this pointless war and they want to get into Public Service to solve big public problems and they would like to engage in the problemsolving and they are prevented from doing so. They are any partisan frenzy so i think there are a lot of folks that would actually do a lot better under a new system. In the book i talk about the Different Cases in the 90s when voters demanded it and felt the political system is unresponsive. A lot of western european democracies made the transition in the first decades of this country anthecentury and all ofe instances the political leaders eventually realized we can actually do quite well under this alternative system and it would be better for the country so i think it is very shortsighted of them to persist in this trench warfare. Thats all they know, but a lot of folks in Public Service got into this because they wanted to do some good for the country and i think they are very frustrated right now. Host i want to pull back a little bit because as i was reading your book, there was a lot of literature that has emerged. So much as it seems to be in response to the 2016 the election and i wonder when i read the book do you think that anything would have been different the way you wrote it maybe some of the arguments that Hillary Clinton won. Would it feel quite as urgent, you made the point earlier about trump and sort of crystallizing some of the flaws in the System People are waking up to. Guest i think a lot of that. It would probably be now in the third or fourth impeachment of Hillary Clinton and we would be looking at a scarier election. Im sure i would have written a different book if i havent been planning a somewhat different book about broadly some of the same things prior to divorce me to rethink. I dont think we would see as many people getting engaged in the response. It would feel like more of an extension of the obama years. In some ways i think that we may be better off as a country for having trump come to power in a way that is completely disorganized rather than a more disciplined figure. Host last question. What do you make of these books on tierney and how democracies die . Your book seems to fall into that genre. How is your conversation with the . Guest the discussion when the forbearance breaks down and this is the path that we are on is the passwords death of democracy as we know it to breakout of these fundamental norms, so its very much in conversation with that. They are not really solutions. One of the things i wanted to do in writing this book it seems like thered been a lot of books in the last few years that came out sort of hair on fire weve got a problem, and then in the end its like people should be nicer to each other. What i was trying to do is take a step back. How did we get to this moment, what are the deeper structural and we cant change the entire structure of the media. We are not going to change human psychology that we can change the incentives because weve done that throughout political history and thats fundamentally what guided the constitution and the idea that institutions matter and the welldesigned institutions minimize the worst mistakes and that is the inspiration that i take in proposing democracy reform. Host i think that you succeed in this book in capturing the breakdown of the structures and looking at the kind of structural problems we have as well as proposing a smart and sensible solution, so its been wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for being here. Guest thank you. Pleasure having this conversation. This program is available as a podcast. All after words programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org. The