The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Two-Party System: Third Parties Need Not Apply

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

The first presidential debate is here, and voters do not seem thrilled with the two, very different candidates. How does a consumerist country built on choice produce so few options? This week, helping us to understand our two party system and why third parties don’t work within it, we’re joined by Max Stearns, Law Professor at University of Maryland Carey School of Law, and the author of “Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy,” as well as Sam Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, and the co-author, with Daniel Schlozman, of “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” Together, they help us to understand the flaws in how our current system functions and offer some possible remedies going forward. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher – Catherine Nouhan Music by Hansdale Hsu --- This podcast is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter Try it for free at this exclusive web address: ziprecruiter.com/ZipWeekly   NetSuite For more info, head to netsuite.com/Weekly --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart. My name is Jon Stewart. I am your host of the podcast. We will be enjoying a conversation today concerning... Guys, I'm just trying to... So when I come into the podcast, I really don't know what level of energy we're talking. Of course, it's the weekly show podcast with Jon Stewart. I'm Jon Stewart. I've got the Uber producer team, Brittany Mimetevic and Lauren Walker with me. And we have been discussing what is the appropriate level of energy to bring to a podcast. On the show, I'm usually shot out of a cannon because I got the Biden cocktail.

They shoot right into my ass or the Trump cocktail to make me ramble. But either way, I'm fired up. So today, the show is going to air. We're taping it the day before, but the show is airing before it's going to be right before the debates, the presidential debates. So you may be listening to this podcast prior to watching debates, or you may be listening to this podcast in your disaster bunker after listening to those debates, because I'm assuming the bar has been set relatively low. If you're watching the news, if both men make it through these 90 minutes without either passing away or starting a war, we will consider it a grand success for the country and for the democracy.

But the big controversy, of course, is what are the criteria so that a third party can't make it in there? Because this election, obviously, people talk about as the one where there is real dissatisfaction with the choices. The choices are clear. I don't think it's a question of whether or not it's clear. The two candidates couldn't be more different as individuals. The things that they want to do for the country couldn't be more different. For instance, if you're interested in any way in women's right to choose or these kinds of other issues.

Well, there's there's no question you've got one party that literally talking about not letting people have IVF. So the issues are clear. The candidates personalities are clear. Their felony records are clear. But there is a great dissatisfaction with that. So RFK Jr. is now considered kind of the leading third party candidate because he polls quite well, foothold in a country? Is it just because

there's always a level of dissatisfaction with the two parties and the two choices that we have? Is there always a feeling of, oh, you know what I'm going to vote for? None of the above. So whatever that means, and that feeling doesn't last. You know, we've had some real challenges. Ross Perot got almost 20% of the vote. George Wallace, people forget about this, George Wallace, who was the former governor of Alabama and a segregationist, he won five states in 1968 as a third party candidate, even though he only got, I think, 13% of the vote or something along those lines. But the point being, why the hell? We're a consumerist country. No, we expect choice. We have lime-eritas. I'm not even sure what a lime-erita is. But we add lime to almost everything and pretend that it's a different product. It's not. It's the same product. So that's going to be the point of today's show. Why is it so hard in a country that is yearning for more choices to get a foothold with a third party? Is it a structural problem in our Constitution?

Is it a corruption problem in that the two parties are a duopoly working to keep everybody else out? We've got two great experts to talk about that. Oh, not to segue too abruptly. We also put out, where did we put out, Lauren? Yeah, we put a call out asking people for some things they'd like us to cover. And Brittany has gathered those together for us. What do you got?

What were they saying? Well, so first of all, my family wrote in. They have a really big issue with me saying the word fuck. So- With you saying it? Yeah, really mad at me about it john set for saying fuck for saying fuck so i've worked with britney now how many we've worked together for many years yeah uh potty mouth on air and off lauren is wearing headphones yeah not uh as a way of equalizing sound as to protect her ears are you talking to me it's to protect her ears from the vicious sailor the vicious dock worker totally no um we got some really great answers honestly and i think their topics we're Vicious sailor. The vicious dock worker. Totally. No. We got some really great answers, honestly, and I think they're topics we're really excited about.

We have gerrymandering, the housing crisis in America. Okay. Long COVID. Education. We're going to hit all this. You know what would be great, too, is to get back into Wall Street fuckery. There's so much Wall Street fuckering going on. is to get back into wall street fuckery there's so much wall street fuckering going on i'd love to check back in on like the mmtmtp bump all that game stop i'd love to check back in on payment for order flow all the things that we tried to talk about uh prior uh the long

covid community that's a really interesting one because uh there are from what i'm understanding and i unfortunately i don and unfortunately I'm not very well versed in all of it, but like millions, we're talking about millions of people that have residual effects from getting these infections and have been debilitated. I mean, there's no question there. I feel like there's been a steady stream of reporting on this, but I don't know. There's not a great understanding. So people may have these symptoms and not even understand what it is.

And it doesn't seem to be progress in research, I assume, is glacially slow. And who knows if they're even studying the correct thing. So that'll be really interesting to get into. John, we had one more question, and we feel like you're the perfect person to answer this. Yes. Somebody wrote in and wants to know, why are the Hamptons so great? Oh, because they're not. Because the Hamptons are basically, you know, all the people you fucking hate the most in Manhattan when you have to go into Manhattan?

Imagine them in shorts. Imagine them in shorts and Crocs fucking clogging up the line at the cappuccino store while you're just waiting in there to get a coffee. And meanwhile, it took you five hours to get out there and you want a bowl of guacamole and it's $88. Why are they so great? Who wrote in they're so great. The Jersey shore is great. Jersey shore is great. The Hamptons are a shit show. Jersey shores is soft custard and slices and men with tattoos quietly singing Bon Jovi to themselves as they try and find their cars in the Lifetime Gym parking lot. That's what we're talking about. Hey, which brings me to the point.

Next week is July 4th. I hope everybody has a great July 4th. We are going to be off. I hope you go down the shore. And when I say go down the shore, I mean the Jersey Shore. Lauren, are you a shore? Do you go Jersey Shore? Where do you lie? Where do you stand? Do shore. And when I say go down the shore, I mean the Jersey Shore. Lauren, are you a shore? Do you go Jersey Shore? Where do you lie?

Where do you stand? Do you see how pale I am? Yeah, all right. I feel you. I can't do something. Yeah, I'm an indoor kid. All right. Well, enough for fumpfering.

Let's get to the guests in talking about our third party system and why we don't get there. Okay, so we're going to get to our guests with us today. Very exciting. Professors. We're not fucking around today, people. We are bringing you professors, men of knowledge. Max Stearns, law professor, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, author of Parliamentary America, the Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, and author Sam Rosenfeld, also an associate professor of political science at Colgate University, and the co-author with Daniel Schlossman of The Hollow Parties, The Many Pasts, and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. Gentlemen,

thank you for joining us. We very much appreciate it. Happy to be here. There is no clarion call of the American electorate more profound than both choices suck. I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, but why don't we have better choices? America America is a consumerist society. We are known for having 31 different flavors of Coke and only two candidates, yet third party candidates almost never get traction in American politics. Why is that? Max Stearns, I'll start with you. Well, thank you again for having me on.

So this traces to what I call the third party dilemma. We have a two party system. It's not what the framers of the Constitution thought they set up. They thought that they set up what I call a rock, paper, scissors Constitution. They thought they were going to be the endless rival games among the three branches of government set up in the Constitution, the legislature. Yep. They thought the battle in American governance was going to be the checks and balance of the Congress, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. They were not considering

that it was going to be a battle of political ideologies. Indeed. And they thought that the system that they set up, and we can add the layer of federalism, would break and control what they call the violence of factions. They thought that they had come up with a system to avoid permanently entrenched factions or precursors to what we think of today as parties. But they set in motion through certain decisions that they made an inevitable path toward a two-party system. And I think the really important thing for voters to understand is it's not a problem of our individual will. It's not like we have a problem because we're not voting for third parties. Our institutions do not create space for third parties to play a significant beneficial role. Instead, it punishes voters when they vote for third parties

rather than rewards them. And the question becomes, how do we restructure our institutions to change that? Sam, why is that? Why are we set up for a binary? Is the Electoral College the big villain in all this because it's the winner-take-all system, a third party, I mean, Ross Perot with the Reform Party got, I think,

20% of the votes. Almost 20%, yeah. Almost 20% of the vote, zero electoral college votes, and disappeared and became a not very consequential party. and became a not very consequential party. Yeah, I mean, the Electoral College catalyzes and exacerbates what I believe the institutions- Don't, Sam, don't. You know, I'm not a professor. So if you're going to start throwing in catalyzing and exacerbating, I'm just going to have to leave.

I withdraw. It makes it worse. Objection sustained. You know, there's no no electoral college in Congress, in state legislatures, governorship, et cetera. And yet you still have two-party dominance all across American history in those places as well. The core thing, I mean, this goes back, there was a political scientist, a Frenchman named Maurice Duverger. Oh, Duverger. I'm so sick of that guy. Mid-20th century. And he put forth what political scientists call a law, Duverger's law,

that says if you have a system of electoral rules in which you have single member districts, so one person occupies a particular geographical unit, and you decide on who that person is by plurality voting, not runoffs, not proportionality. It's whoever gets the most votes wins. Direct democracy. Well, it's whoever gets the most votes wins. Right. That combination, plurality voting and single member districts, tends to lead to, this is why it's not really a law, it's just a kind of a rule of thumb, tends to lead to, this is why it's not really a law, it's just a kind of a rule of thumb,

tends to lead to stable two-party systems and makes it very hard for a kind of equilibrium, I'll withdraw equilibrium, multi-party systems that can continue to be competitive. And it's because of, as Max is alluding to, whoever gets the most votes wins and there's only one winner immediately makes everybody need to be strategic in their decisions. You get afraid that what you're going to do, completely logically afraid that you will end up potentially spoiling the race and allowing for your least favorite candidate to win. Well, that's everybody coordinates. Isn't that always the big criticism of a third party vote? So there is always a clamoring in American politics for this other choice. I would call it none of the above. And different people represent none of the above. Right now it's RFK Jr. or it was Ralph Nader or

Jill Stein or Cornel West. Somebody is none of the above. Sometimes they represent really narrow interests. Sometimes it is just, I think in the case of maybe Ross Perot, this feeling that the government had no common case of maybe Ross Perot, this feeling that the government had no common sense, as Ross Perot would say, you know, it doesn't make sense. You could take two chickens and put them on a pig's back, but that doesn't give you a barn. Like he would just say crazy things. But, you know, there's this idea that that protest somehow represents something that is missing in American politics, whether it be pragmatism or common sense, but it never has legs. And even if they got in, let's say the protest vote got in, who would they govern with? Wouldn't they just have to join with whatever the binary is in Congress?

So that's right. The intuition in our politics is that in order to win, you have to keep your side intact and fracture the opposition. Both sides see that they have to keep their sides intact, fracture the opposition. That leads to two teams, which we call parties. So that dynamic is really deeply embedded. It's the opposite of what the framers thought they did and what they intended, but it's hardwired into our system. And simply wanting to support a third party doesn't make that go away. The problem is that when you vote for a third party, if it's to the left of the Democrat or to the right of the Republican, it's a spoiler.

I came up with a term for my book, a randomizer. If you've got somebody like RFK Jr., who looks like he's going to pull votes from both sides, then it's a randomizer. And it renders the choice of president really a kind of random outcome, because you don't know in a three-way race how that's going to play out. I have to interrupt very quickly. I think one of you is about to be arrested. Sorry. I'm in the heart of Washington, D.C. here. Oh, Sam is about to get hauled away for discussing this very delicate thing. But Max, then if the idea is that's what it comes to,

why doesn't the two-party system then function better? If the idea is that a third party is anachronistic for the way that this system was designed, even though the framers maybe didn't intend it that way and they were, I don't know if you guys know this, gods amongst men. I don't know if you know they were infallible. But let's say they didn't do that. Well, then why doesn't the two-party system function

in a way that doesn't entice people to these third-party options? Yeah. So I know you're joking when you say God's amongst men, but I do want to say, because I know you're joking and I assume most of you are. I am joking. No, no, no. I know that.

I am absolutely joking. I know that, but I want to make sure everybody understands. One of the things that we have to get over is American exceptionalism. The idea that there was a group of geniuses who happened to meet at a particular time and place who solved all the problems of democracy. That's not true. They actually messed up in pretty significant ways. The system that they constructed isn't the system that we have, or at least the ones that

they thought they constructed. And so it's really important to recognize that. Did they recognize that they had screwed it up? They did very early on. I mean, you can look at the fact that George Washington's farewell address talks about partisanship. You can see that Thomas Jefferson, you know- They became partisan. I mean, the very people who created an anti-party constitution formed the first party system in the United States, first two party party system. By the way, my favorite part of it is they didn't even wait. Like, I think I think it was them.

Washington gave the speech about don't do this, don't do this. And like four years later, they were like, all right, we're going to do it. Yeah, he had already done it. It was like, yeah, anyway. No, Sam, anyway, tell us, what did they already do? Well, his famous speech against partisanship says a lot of prescient things. It'll invite, it'll make us vulnerable to foreign powers manipulating our democracy, et cetera. But it was also, it was a partisan speech in disguise. It was Alexander Hamilton kind of turning the shiv,

trying to make Jeffersonians sound anti-American and opponents of the Constitution. Whoa. Yeah, they were doing it all in the 1790s. It was- That's deep. So Washington, in his sort of above it all, savior of the nation, founder of the nation. And by the way, all I know about this is from watching Hamilton.

So everything that I say is from apparently everybody rhymed back in the day. But Washington famously above it all was actually a, it was a partisan speech elevating the federalists absolutely because there was no uh in spite of themselves they became party builders because they disagreed with each other about governance and it turned out they as max was saying they were wrong about uh they thought that the creek could create create a system to avoid the mischiefs of faction, to avoid parties. And in fact – And to avoid dictatorships and to avoid libertarians. But in fact, there are no liberal democracies anywhere that are not in essential ways organized by political parties.

And they found that that was the case right away. But there was nothing in the 1790s, there was no legitimacy around the idea of permanent, partial, conflicting opposition teams in government that would rotate in and out of power. And so if you make a speech about how bad parties are, that was in part a way of trying to say the people who are opposed to our government are in fact against the country, against the Constitution, they're enemies of the Republic.

And one thing I'll just add to that, the first implicit acknowledgement that the framers got it wrong in the Constitution itself is the 12th Amendment, which for the first time lets a president and vice president run together on a slate. Otherwise, you ended up with this weird shotgun marriage where you've got a Federalist president, Adams, and a Democratic Republican vice president, Jefferson, who hate each other until they love each other later on in life, but end up running against each other. Yeah. Can I tell you, there is nothing better for me than watching professors amen each other. Max is in there like the first of the 12th Amendment. And Sam is like, yeah, my glasses are fogging up.

I'm so excited. You get a max. But also, isn't the first thing that all men are created equal and they have a provision where some men are three fifths of a man? Like, isn't that also somewhat of acknowledgement of we're created equal, and then literally the math is different than that within the Constitution? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's one of three causes that, without mentioning slavery, condone and institutionalize it. You know, so this idea that these people were sort of demigods,

I mean, it is deeply troublesome to treat them as though they were carrying tablets down from Sinai. They weren't, they were men drafting a document. They, they, you know, they were subject to the limitations of knowledge of the day and they got things wrong. There's a way of putting a positive gloss on that, that in part, they were not gods. They were fallible men, but also they were victims of being political innovators. Like we have the oldest continuing formal democratic constitution in the world, and a lot of what they were developing was kind of sui generis.

Things like proportional representation systems hadn't been invented yet, hadn't been developed. And so why did they decide then? Was there was there a conversation about a parliamentary system? Was there a conversation about, you know, or they just really thought, no, we've devised a system where the different warring factions are the institutions of government, not the ideologies of individuals. There is some possibility that we could have gone closer to a parliamentary system, but the fact is they really did think that they were going to break this notion of factions and parties. Madison, in his Virginia plan, Madison's original proposal involved the president being selected by Congress.

I mean, there's other things in that scheme as well. Right. But that in and of itself is like a parliamentary notion. I mean, wasn't the election of Jefferson selected by Congress? Wasn't that how it went down? Well, that's because the Electoral College failed for the first of two times that sent the election to Congress. And you ended up with this strange result. And here's the great scene from Hamilton, where Alexander Hamilton actually endorses Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Byrne and supposedly said, it's a great line, he said, I'd rather have a person with the wrong principles than a person with no principles. Right, right. Boom. Come on. The room where it happened. I'm going to try not to do the song and dance. All right. We will be right back. So now that we're back, they create the system. It immediately devolves into partisanship.

And at that point, it seems like now the parties are there. Is it that the parties have colluded to keep this as a binary and to keep out the ability for reform parties or populist parties or other things to infiltrate them? Or is the system as designed make it nearly impossible for us to spread beyond those two parties? Or is it a combination of both? I would say there are these, Max will talk about other kind of formal institutions that bake it in to a certain extent. The parties do, elected officials, electoral rules are controlled

by states and state legislatures. They control things like how many signatures you need to get access to a ballot line. And you can make that more or less onerous. And certainly, once you have kind of two major parties, you can see, and it varies state by state, they make it more easy or harder for others to break in. on the debate stage you need 15 in four uh independent polls and you need to be registered so that you could get 270 electoral votes it's an incredibly high bar absolutely and then the flip side though is american american parties uh are a entrenched duopoly, but they are also, as organizations, incredibly permeable. They change a lot. It's very easy. Sometimes they become a family organization. Exactly. I mean, you're seeing it right now. Sometimes you just put your daughter-in-law in there and it becomes an arm of your real estate empire.

Then you can see, but lots of people who aren't in Trump's family kind of acting as if they are kind of his bodyguards, his crew. But it's just to say, the major parties are flexible organizations that time and time again across American history have adopted some of the priorities, the energies, the movements that had powered third party movements that keep them- They co-opt them. Yeah, they keep-

Or they subsume them. Yeah, but they do. It's not a conspiracy to snuff out all of the actual substance of the third parties. The third parties have huge substantive effects, even though politically and electorally, they don't last. But it is, going back to your question, though, there is a kind of, you know, sometimes the parties fight each other over institutions, but sometimes they agree on institutional outcomes because they have a sort of symbiotic relationship, right? Would they benefit at the expense of third parties? And we see that in certain Supreme Court cases. I don't want to bore you with the details of it, but there are some Supreme Court cases that have really disallowed third parties to challenge their way into being more effective competitors. And one sort of central lesson of

our history is the last place to count on for fixing our democracy is the Supreme Court. That's not going to be the institution that saves our democracy. We have to go back to some- Boy, you know what? That's when I'm going to go preach. But clearly they're not the institution that's going to save it. How many of us can afford Supreme Court justices? I mean, you know, maybe I could get a couple of them, but, you know. Well, and on this presidential immunity, I mean, we're going to find out in the next, the idea that the president, I mean, talk about something that is an utter anachronism or anathema to the Constitution. The idea that the president is a king is the whole reason we fought that war in the first place. Yeah, well, well, right. And one thing that we need to, you know, Sam talked about the fact that we have the longest constitution of any nation in the world, which is certainly true.

But one thing I encourage people to think about is like, if you're thinking about the brilliance or wisdom of any system, like an engineering system, business model, musical genre, would you say, if I can find a single outlier that's lasted longer than others, that must be the best? liar that's lasted longer than others, that must be the best. Or would you say that a system that's been replicated again and again and again, benignly adapted to different situations, that's the test of a really wise and sound system? On the replication test, which I think is the one that virtually anybody would pick, our system absolutely fails. We've exported democracy- Wait, fails? Fails. We have exported democracy around the globe, but we have never once successfully exported two-party presidentialism. That is a model on which we are alone on the stage for good reason.

Most systems that are considered successful democracies have proportional representation and coalition governance, multi-party governance in a proportional representation system. And we- So you're suggesting that you're talking about, I'm assuming, the European model or the way that- Well, there's more than one model. So we need to be careful about that. It's not as if parliamentary captures all the nuances across systems. One of the things I try to do in my book is take readers on a virtual world tour. I take them to seven countries, not just limited to Europe. But the central lesson of that tour, there's two central lessons of the tour.

There are two threats to democracy, too few parties like the US, too many parties, hyper fractalized parties. Too many parties gets you things like Nazi Germany. Absolutely. Where like a very fringe party with, I don't know, 27% of the vote can suddenly take over and do all those things. Or Brexit. Absolutely. So you need to come up with what most political scientists think the sweet spot is somewhere between three to four at the low end, seven to eight at the high end.

So who's got that? Who would you point to and say there's a success? Germany has a system, although they've adapted it a year ago to make it a little bit different than it had been. But really post-World War II Germany is based on what's called mixed member proportionality. Sorry that it's kind of a- Mixed member. Mixed member proportionality. I'm sure there's a German word for that. That probably takes a minute and a half to say.

Wiener Slab in Mütter. Exactly. Exactly. But the idea is that, so they have a two chamber legislature like we do. The Bundestag's roughly equivalent to the Senate. The Bundestag's roughly equivalent to the House. Right. And what you do is when you're voting for the lower chamber, you cast two ballots, not one.

One is in what they call a constituency seat election, which is just like we have now, our district elections. And one is by party. So what they do is they use the party ballots nationally to allocate party proportionality for the nation as a whole. And the consequence of that party ballot is no single party is likely to get a majority. And that means parties have to come together to actually form a government. I'm proposing a simpler system than that, but a variation on that. And I think this is one of the vulnerabilities that Trump exposed of our democracy, is that the democracy is held together actually by these hundreds and thousands of administration positions that do things like certify elections,

hold elections. And those positions are held by, I'm going to say partisans, but not ideologues. And what they're trying to do is replace a partisan system with an ideologue system so that it supercharges the kinds of unfair manipulations of the system to keep yourselves in power. And the way I look at it in our system, and Sam, maybe you can talk about this, is, for instance, you look at certain states like Arizona, that's kind of a purple state. But if you look at certain states like Arizona, that's like kind of a purple state. Right. If you look at their state legislature, it's supercharged. Yeah. It's it's highly, you know, super, super partisan. It's got a super majority for one party that clearly doesn't represent what the people are. this two-party system that has been so, it's been gamed out of effectiveness and gamed for pure

power purpose. Is that a fair statement, Sam? I think the polarized extremism, particularly of Republican state party organizations in a lot of these places, and it's most dramatic precisely in swing states. In red states, they can kind of ease off the gas pedal a little bit, but it's supercharged in Wisconsin and North Carolina, in Arizona. It's in part a reflection of the weakness of state party organizations and the kind of party organizations at other points in time and in particular places the united states have been rooted civic organizations that have a real kind of um a foundation of the community yeah exactly both both at the state level and then state parties

were big actors particularly in the uh in an era in which they controlled delegations at conventions, and they had kind of clout in the national level. And as that recedes, as a broader story of the decline of face-to-face civic organizations entirely, what you get is party organizations at the state level and local level that are usually just kind of empty shells, they become backwaters for local activists, ideologues, these days spun up around national issues. So all politics are national. All politics are national.

And the states are the meth labs of democracy. They're no longer the labs of democracy. The Arizona Republican Party is a great case in point how insanely trumpy it's gotten and kind of personalized around whatever trump spun up about that's what the small number of local activists who control these state uh uh parties these days uh care about as well and then you know they'll censure uh elected officials in their own party if they uh run a file of trump and sure i think oklahoma Lankford, who was their senator,

who was an unbelievably consistent hardline conservative, but because he had proposed a border bill that Trump didn't want, they were like, that's it, you're done here. And it's like part of the problem is in the politics nationalizing so much, people's identities as political actors being so caught up in national kind of culture war conflicts means that there's all these – there's subnational issues and policy conflicts that could give rise to much more flexible and fluid and have in the past coalitions. But in part, it's a function of organizational decay at the subnational level that you get such polarized state parties.

So basically, the ethos is we've got to own people as opposed to govern. But, Max, I want to ask you, so the two-party system then is not the best methodology. American exceptionalism is wrong, even when you look at our political system being the most effective around the world, but what have we done to that two-party system to make it even less effective? And how have we hollowed out? Is it a hollowing out of the way we select our delegates and our people? What have we done to this two-party system that's made it so ineffective for actual governance. Yeah. So one thing that's happened, and just a slight difference with Sam on this is, you know, after Barack Obama's first election in 2008, Republican operatives figured out that for pennies on the dollar, they could throw money at below the radar state races in blue and

purple states. And basically, if they turned enough of those states red, because- You're talking about Secretary of State and- No, no, I'm talking about General Assembly races. And because they draw the congressional maps for the US House of Representatives, they could actually turn their delegations red. And this strategy, which David Daley, he wrote a book called Rat Eft. It's really fascinating. How dare he? That is the title. And he tells the story, this audacious story of a plan called red mapping, where essentially the idea is to hyper gerrymander these maps so that you get entrenched Republican control of the House. They thought they had a lock on it for 30 years. They didn't. It flipped back in 2019. But when you

combine red mapping and blue mapping, here's what we can say about the House of Representatives. It is no longer the case that we are choosing our representatives through our votes. Our representatives are choosing us through hyper-gerrymandered districts. And the consequence of that is to push the centers of the two parties increasingly far apart. And if you look at the Pew research data, they have a graphic, they actually have it, and you can actually see it like a cartoon moving. From 1994 to 2017, you had had the parties with some degree of significant overlap. If you go back to the 50s, there was much greater overlap. But the centers of those two parties have grown further and further apart.

One cause is hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Another cause is the transformation of the way that we receive news and news-like content through social media. And this has created this synergistic loop. The media is now incentivized for those extremities as well. I mean, it's incentivized for engagement and engagement is only possible if people are scared or angry. But I would ask you guys, when you talk about red mapping, it doesn't take much of a push

to get there because going back to, again, bringing us back around to the founders, didn't the way that they designed this as a compromise for slave owners in the South who did not have the kinds of populations, you know, how do you create a democratic system where people's voices matter when one side of the country really doesn't have that many people who are considered people. So what you do is you overweight their representation. And that has carried us through, I mean, the Senate, for God's sakes, is affirmative action for rural whites. I mean, there's no question that they're overrepresented in the Senate. Absolutely true. The Senate is the single most anti-democratic institution of any institution in a country that claims to be a democracy. If you add up the population of the 21 lowest population states, so they get 42% of the Senate, it equals California, which gets 2% of the Senate.

By the way, I think that's the right call. I don't know if you've been out there, but it's probably the right call. A lot of weed shops, a lot of weed shops. All right, we will be right back. We are back. It's egregious. The problem is that fixing the Senate won't fix our problem.

And the other problem is to even fix any of those systems, whether it's, you know, there's the direct vote or there's the changes in the electoral system, need 75% of the states and nobody is going to cede power. When you have a system that's designed more for minority rule, who is going to cede that power? I do just want to kind of point out. Do we have a professor fight brewing? Are you going to come? Well, I will say that if you look at the United States Senate, it's gerrymandered for white rural voters. That's correct. But it's also a polarized chamber and there is no gerrymandering in the Senate. You know what I mean? Which is just to say-

But it is not as polarized as the House. It's true. I can tell you from spending time in the Senate and spending time in the House, the House is the wild west. Of course. You walk into some of those offices and you're just like,

holy shit, that guy's just a bumper sticker. And witness Landry, as we were just talking about. He's now one of his own party. But the same trends of, there was over the course of the 20th century, very deep ideological divisions within the parties, especially in the country were a pivotal faction in the New Deal Democratic Party. And then there were ideological differences in the Republican Party as well that fostered an era in which people rightly complained about Tweedledee and Tweedledum. You don't have a clear choice. And a lot of bipartisan lawmaking, a bipartisan kind of culture.

People complain about that for, I think, good, small-D democratic reasons. But people now say, we do have a clear choice. We just don't particularly think either choice represents our interests. I mean, the two parties could not be more different. There is no question a clear, well-delineated choice between not just party and issues, but personalities, but people still are dissatisfied with those

two choices. Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that underneath these two parties, we really naturally have roughly five to six parties. So the Republicans probably- You're talking about how the, and those are represented like Freedom Caucus. Yeah. I mean, well, another way to think of it is if we actually had the system that I advocate, which would generate a true multi-party system, the Republicans would probably fracture to the traditional conservatives or GOP and kind of the MAGA or America First Party. The Democrats would split between traditional center left Democrats and progressives.

There probably is a Green Party. There might be a Libertarian Party. So we naturally have six parties. But how do you limit it? Because wouldn't then everybody say, well, I'm a little bit at odds with the libertarian party, so I'm going to start the green libertarians. So the way you limit it is to devise a system that generates neither too few parties like the US and the UK, nor too many parties. Like for example, I know in Sam's book, he talks about the Netherlands, which is a perfectly good

example of that. Brazil is a good example of that. France is a good example of that. You're saying too many. Those are too many. So you've got the risks on both sides. I want to hit that sweet spot. And mixed member proportionality does that. The reason is because- Explain mixed member proportionality again, so that I understand the sweet spot. So you vote in a constituency election, one ballot, and you vote by party. So let's take Washington State. Washington has 10 seats in the House of Representatives.

My scheme would double it. The House of Representatives double the size, and we use mixed member proportionality. Imagine that- They would get 20 seats. They would get 20 seats. So imagine in the district seating, they get five Democrats and five Republicans. And imagine that in the party proportional votes, four parties each get 25%. We'll just arbitrarily say progressives, the Democrats, the Republicans, and America first

all get 25%. Now what happens is the Democrats and Republicans each got five seats already. That is 25% out of 20, right? So now the progressives and America First each pick up five seats. So now Washington State sends to Washington, D.C., a delegation with five of each of those parties. And I propose we do this on a state-by-state basis. That's the first of my three electoral reform amendments. How many representatives would we have in Congress? We would double the size of the House, which is for political buy-in. So 870?

870. This is for political buy-in purposes, which I can explain. So we need to build a bigger building. Yeah, if the worst problem the United States faces is better architecture for the U.S. Capitol, I'll take it. Right, right, right. I think we can all agree that, like, let that be the most serious concern. Now, Sam, so I would say that's probably not your solution. So where would you land on how we fix this kind of thing?

Well, look, I think people should go out and buy Max's book and read it. They should buy my book. I'll second that. I'll third it. Because precisely on this exceptionalism, it's like Americans just don't realize that there are democracies that work really well all over the world. And they have huge variations in how their systems work. And none of them look like ours. And people should take a look.

People should read that Max is spreading the good news about parliamentary systems. I don't foresee the path to this happening anytime soon. You believe it could be positive, but impossible. Well, yeah. I mean, and so I do think- You look at how to fix or how to ameliorate what we have now. Okay. So what would you do then within that? It is in part also by writing books and trying to spread the good news in this point about just like people should recognize that political parties as institutions, which everyone loves to denigrate, including the parties themselves,

are in fact kind of the essential cornerstone of all democracies everywhere and always have been. And that what you need to do is if you are a politically engaged person, if you're motivated to follow politics, to go out and do things, you should conduct your political activism with a frame of mind of how am I participating in, in a constructive way, building up effective party organizations. That usually means- But that would be, I mean, that is like the Tea Party. That is, I mean, that is what they did. I wouldn't necessarily say that was productive for governance, but it's certainly what you're talking about. But beyond the idea of us being better people or better citizens, it feels like, so we come down to the two things, and I guess we can sort of wrap on this. Our democracy is fragile right now because the government doesn't feel like it meets in any way the foundational needs of the people.

And then so you have to look at that in two ways. Is it corruption within the system that makes it so that it doesn't meet the needs? Or is it a structural problem that we cannot overcome that is being co-opted by two parties seeking power? That would be the foundational question of this. So let me say this. One area where Sam and I have profound agreement, and a lot of people in this space don't agree with the two of us, we are both pro-party reformers. We both believe it is essential to have vital parties in a democracy. In fact, I'll even say- And they are not vital right now. They are hollowed out, basically-

Correct. There's only one way to have a country without parties, and that's to have a dictator declare all other parties illegal, right? So really, the antithesis of parties is dictatorship. And so you have to have parties. The question is, how do you make parties do the effective work for the citizenry? And where I think Sam and I might disagree was impossible to do because it's always been exceedingly difficult. It's impossible until it's inevitable. But there are a lot of reform proposals out there that are anti-party reform proposals, and they're getting a lot of press. Ranked choice voting, at-large multi-member districts, term limits.

These are anti-party. The whole point of these proposals is get rid of the people that are in Congress now, replace them with somebody else. Mine is the only proposal- But it doesn't necessarily address how they would govern then, does it? And mine's the only proposal that actually allows every sitting member of the House and Senate to keep their jobs. And so when people say, is it realistic to reform? It is if you can actually compare it to other proposals and come up with a solution that lets every sitting member of the House and Senate keep their jobs and allow them to become the heroes of democracy. And in my book, I explain how that's possible. Yeah, I mean, I've seen those. But if the alternative is to get rid of them. Right. But Sam, to that point, would you suggest that this is our, the lack of functioning of our democracy for the needs of the people is a structural issue in the way that the

founders had designed this bicameral legislation, or it is a capture and a corruption of that system by bad political actors and money? Where would you come down? I come down on the former. I do try, particularly to students, to emphasize the story here is not fundamentally a cynical conspiracy. The story is a lot of people— Well, tell RFK Jr. that. They're keeping him out of the debate. A lot of people are, more so now than ever because we're in a very ideologically polarized time.

People are sincerely motivated in what they're doing. Most of them think what they're system that we haven't talked about. The other distinction between parliamentary systems and presidential ones is it's in presidential systems, separation of power systems, that you get divided government, that you get chronic gridlock when one party controls. And it's the ill fit of we have like parties that are becoming more parliamentary like in some ways in their ideological distinctiveness, but they can occupy power at the same time. So the one kind of I would I would advocate for people to be thinking about exactly the big, broad structural arguments that Max is talking about. I would advocate for people to think about political parties and what they can do to constructively improve them. But at a more kind of like in-between level of reforming institutions, think about elements in the

political system that are amenable to change, that enhance the capacity for gridlock. So things like the Senate filibuster. Oh, yeah. Things about like- That hypercharges the poor design of the Senate, no question. And it makes it impossible. Again, talk about an outlier. There's no country on earth where there's this unbelievably unrepresentative second chamber that you have to get a super majority of that second. It gives the opposition party veto power.

It's most important, I think, if I want to have everybody take something away from this conversation, it would be that. Because that, what you both brought up, I think, is something I had not thought about at all, which is our country is an absolute outlier. We consider ourselves a shining city on a hill of democratic excellence and a model to the world.

And what you're saying is not only are we not that, our system is actually one of the least functional democratic systems of any of the others, whether you want to call it a democratic system or a constitutional republic or a constitutional republic that lays out a democratic system of representation. We're one of the least functioning, and we don't even consider that. I think that's exactly right. I think if your listeners or viewers take that lesson and internalize it and just begin to question it, I think one of the hardest things is to begin questioning the things that you were taught as a child. We all went to school. No, I'm serious about this. No, man, I totally agree.

That's such a great point. It's that whole nostalgia of America was the best, and they always name that time when they were seven years old, and you're like, right, because that's when you were chasing the ice cream truck. But it's not real. My one, the time I cannot allow myself to stay neutral is when I teach

undergrads. I teach a book by Robert Dahl called How Democratic is the U.S. Constitution. And when we get to the Senate and just the kind of justifications for equal representation of states, and it's one student after another, whatever their political views, they're just like, well, yeah, well, you have the House to represent people. This is, you gotta, otherwise everyone's gonna gang up

on Connecticut or something. And I can't stop myself from sputtering, just like breakout in hives. Because people, it's just so assumed, so ingrained. And there's a real status quo bias to that uh well guys uh i i so appreciate it max stearns law professor university of maryland carey school of law author of parliamentary america the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy sam rosenfeld associate professor of political science at colgate and the co-author with daniel slots of The Hollow Parties, The Many Past and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. I urge you to buy

both books. And then you have, by then, I'm going to say three weeks to fix our two-party representative democracy. Gentlemen, thank you so much for a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for having us. Helping me see some things that I really hadn't thought about. So thank you guys. Thank you. Boy, did I enjoy that. I feel like I got a real, I don't know what you call it, like AP history course on there. But when he said our democracy, when he was talking about it being replicated, I thought he was going to go, our democracy has been replicated all around the world.

It's the most successful form of government. He's like, nobody's replicated it and nobody wants to because it doesn't work. Did you find that shocking? I mean, yes and no. I've been reading their books, so I kind of knew it was coming. But also the point about the nostalgia the nostalgia i think is just so true right no we just can't see ourselves no you mean we're not the best i don't get it well even like he was saying like not only are we not the best we're like i'm not even sure we're ranked like

they're talking about all these all these other systems that are probably but uh a fabulous conversation those guys boy they'd be fun to have as professors. So I think it was great. The students are lucky. Very lucky. We are off next week. It is July 4th. I hope you guys enjoy yourselves.

As always, lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mimetevic, the man behind the glass, Rob Vitolo, video editor and engineer, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher, Catherine Nguyen, and EPs. Executive producer for those who are Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thank you guys so much for all of it. And keep those comments and stuff coming on the socials there, whatever you got.

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