Breaking The Two-Party Doom Loop with Lee Drutman

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of Another Way. Today we're going to talk to Lee Drutman for Policy Wonks and Geeks. He's a familiar name, but maybe not to everyone. He's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He's a fellow in the Political Reform Program, which is an extremely important part of New America, which is one of the most exciting think tanks in Washington. The book we're going to focus on today is his latest book, Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop, the Case for Multi Party Democracy in America, which came out last year from Oxford. But he's also really well known for a book that I admire greatly from 2015, the business of America is Lobbying, which unpacks in a powerful way the economy of influence that lobbyists are at the center of. And compliments, really. Not in a E sense of that word, but in an I sense of that word. Or I'm sorry, this is the mistake that I can't make. Not in the I sense of the word, but the E sense of the word compliments the work that I had put out about Republic Lost and the role of lobbying inside of the corruption of our Congress. He's been a winner of the American Political Science Association's Robert Dahl Award, even though this book is quite critical of some of the assumptions of Robert dahlia. And in 2021 this year he was named Washington, the Group of Washington's most Influential People by Washington magazine. This is a really interesting conversation we have, ending up with a question mark, an acknowledged point that he's not sure of, which I'm even more excited about because it shows a great mind to know exactly where there's more thinking to be done. So stay tuned. Lee, thanks so much for talking to us. So you and I have been wandering in the same space for a long time, and I was really struck. I was struck by your first book, which of course was extraordinary in unpacking the economy of influence of lobbying in America. But this book, too, Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop, is also quite important and profound in some ways that it helps us understand our past. So I want to walk us through it. Kind of like the average thinks they're informed but are actually not terribly informed about our past and why that matters today, kind of listener. And so I want to begin by just, you know, presenting what seems like an obvious question to many people. Haven't we always had two parties in America?

Well, yes and no. I mean, yes in the sense that we have always had the Democratic Party, well, at least we've had two parties. We've had the Democratic Party going back to 1830. We've had the Republican Party party going back to the 1850s. And so yes, these parties are very old, older than most democracies in the world. But for a long time they were these really broad catch all parties that didn't really stand for all that much. For a while they were just these sort of overlapping coalitions of many local and state state parties at a time in which national politics was secondary to local and state politics. And then for a good portion of the 20th century, I would say we had something more like a four party system with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. And that really began to flatten out the 90s. And I would say that really we're only a decade into having a genuine two party system with two parties that are truly distinct and represent very different and most importantly, non overlapping coalitions. So this is something new and distinct. And I think it's a core way to think about some of the really hard problems that are bedeviling our democracy right now.

So to think about what the parties were, why would you have been a Democrat in like 1910? Like what was it to be a Democrat or a Republican in our history that distinguishes it today? Because today most people have a very clear ideological sense or a sense of the ideological commitments of these parties. Even if geeks will argue that the ideology is pretty incoherent. But we have a sense of what it is to be a Republican. What is to be a Democrat? What did it mean to be a Republican in 1910 or a Democrat in 1910?

Well, 1910 is actually a very interesting year to ask that question. And I don't know if you picked that on purpose or somewhat randomly, but it's sort of the middle of the Progressive era. And there's a sense in which the parties are transitioning in that from the Gilded Era into really the early 20th century, politics was really machine politics. It was really patronage politics. And so you'd be a Democrat because your family was a Democrat. And if the Democrat won, that might mean that your family got some patronage jobs. And there was also a real sense that politics was also about group identities. So depending on where you lived and your religion or your ethnicity, you know, you were just going to be a Democrat or a Republican because that was what people like you did. And it wasn't really substantively about policy so much as it was being part of a club. And you could still find these kind of Democratic and Republican clubs in some cities. But national politics was not. Hadn't been about all that much. And even local politics was just about local politics. So it wasn't until that era in which you had sort of progressive reformers who said, oh, these parties are just corrupt machines. They're controlled by rich plutocrats for rich plutocrats. And the way to solve the problem of that is to just, you know, get rid of parties as much as we can, make everything nonpartisan and encourage independent thinking, which I think has always proved a bit of a chimera and an elusive dream in the American reform tradition. But it really wasn't until the New Deal when the modern parties started to really stand for distinct visions of the economy. And it wasn't until the post civil rights era when the two parties really began to stand for distinct visions of America's cultural identity.

Yeah, I'm going to follow that up, but then I want to go back to the Civil War period for a second. But let's follow up with that in particular, because what's striking in the history that you tell and others have told, I don't know as powerfully, but have tried to cover as well, is the real sense in the post New Deal period that the problem with American parties was that they didn't have clear ideologies. Like the American Political Science association runs these studies to try to unpack the way in which we might make parties ideological so that voters, when they went to vote, would have a clearer vision like here's why I'm a Republican or here's why I'm a Democrat. And this muddy non ideological party system that was the partisan, the character of partisan politics at that period was just viewed to be a mistake. Now it's kind of hard to imagine a period where what you'd be arguing for is more ideological purity. But how would. What's the most charitable way to understand what they thought they were doing?

Well, well, I mean, I think they were actually doing something quite important, which is that they were trying to give voters clear choices so that when people went to the ballot box they could say, this is my vision of government and I'd like to be able to vote definitively for that. The other thing, if you read that 1950 APSA report towards a more responsible two party system, is that there's a sense that the problems that American government would have to deal with, particularly after World War II, as America became the leading democracy in the world, were going to be of a scale that the parochial party system that was really about log world politics and local interests was not going to be able to handle. So what the folks behind that report were trying to do was to really elevate a vision of democracy that gave voters clear choices and also gave a way of structuring clear party programs that would be up to the challenges that they thought a country demanded. In addition, you know, there was a frustration among a lot of liberals who were behind that report that the party system of that era had really suppressed civil rights, which was a very important critique and something that we should be careful of lest we nostalgize. The kind of muddy bipartisanship of the 40s and 50s is that it came at a cost of keeping civil rights off the national agenda. So I think there was certainly a justification. And also, if you read that report, there's this sense that couldn't possibly be the case that we would have these very distinct ideological parties and that we would have these cumulative identity conflicts. And the authors of that report noted that that would be terrible, it would be a disaster. But they just couldn't fathom that that would be the case because there was nothing in the American political experience that had led them to that. And there was a sense that, you know, the two party system was going to inherently be moderate and, and you know, it could work together. I mean, I think the, this is, this is, and I should say that this was not a new idea. I mean, it was a tradition in political science back to the origins of Woodrow Wilson, who had looked across the Atlantic Ocean and seen what they perceived as an orderly British system, Westminster system, in which the parties were coherent and semi responsible. And they thought that the American Constitution had made a mistake in trying to separate these powers. And that, you know, parties had done was to kind of create some order of a inherently chaotic and byzantine system.

Yeah, this is the point, you make this. Well, but this is a point that it's hard in, in the theory to understand its significance. But you know, to have two clear parties in a parliamentary system where if one side wins, they get to deliver. They just get to say, Here are the 10 things we're going to do. And at the next election you can say, how many of those 10 things did you do? That's very different from the American system where because we have such a powerful president who is not directly tied to Congress, you have this almost random potential for a party to actually deliver on what they say they're going to do. I mean, they can deliver in principle, assuming you've got unitary control between the Presidency and Congress. But if you don't have that, then, you know, they can be held up by the party that's controlling Congress or held up by the President. And, and the whole idea of measuring a party based on how successful they are at achieving what they promise to do just seems kind of weird in our context. So you can, so you can understand why they would love the Westminster system because they could see it could achieve things. But it seems like nobody's really thinking through carefully what it would mean to try to transplant that into this very strong presidential system with a Congress that obviously doesn't have to go along.

Yeah, I think that's certainly true. And I think the idea was that what they had hoped was that they would kind of bridge that separation of powers by having stronger party committees. But I think there's even a deeper critique of that, which is that the Westminster system is really not the idealized version that these reformers thought it was. And having a two party system in which voters can sort of adjudicate the performance of a party in government versus a party out of government requires a level of reserve that voters are not attached to the political parties, but rather just kind of stand away from politics and observe performance, which is a very hard thing to do given that so much of policy making happens over long periods of time and the effects of policies happen over long periods of time. And so, you know, it's, it's not like we have these neat. It's not, it's not like, you know, hiring somebody, you know, to run a department and then, you know, in which they have total autonomy and then evaluating their performance. I mean, evaluating the performance of a party in government is extremely difficult, even if people are independent. But the reality is, of course, that if the parties are genuinely different, then people tend to form attachments to those parties, which then makes them skeptical of the other party's promises and more likely to cut their party an extra bit of slack. And so the whole premise of accountability then just kind of blows up. I mean, that's always been the promise of a two party system, is that it allows for accountability, but the accountability only works if the parties are not really distinct enough for voters to have loyalty, and in which case then it's hard to choose one of the two parties. And you're, I mean, you're just electing, you know, a party to manage things, and then the parties are kind of indistinguishable, so you're just going back and forth. I mean, the whole theory is, you know, somewhat incoherent when you actually probe at it.

Yeah, because if people have an identity that's associated with their party where they call themselves a Republican, not because they have a list of policies which they've examined themselves internally and they discover they like, but instead they just identify with the idea of a Republican or idea of a Democrat, then this whole idea of, like, punishing the Republicans because they've not been sufficiently Republican is just kind of crazy. Which is what the Never Trumpers discovered to their great shock, when a president would come along and call himself a Republican and then reject some of the most important principles of the then dominant Republican Party. And it didn't seem to matter to most of the people in the party, only the, you know, the kind of intellectual elite who noticed that this was true. Which I think brings out the point that you're making that the whole idea that this dynamic is going to impose discipline on the basis of policy becomes a fantasy if policy isn't the issue, but instead it's just identity.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Or you're relying on some thin sliver of quote, unquote, swing voters who are somehow going to decide the fate of the nation. And often these swing voters are the least politically engaged and, you know, kind of are make their minds up on some sort of, you know, feeling or mood or, or character or just, you know, some. Some idiosyncratic feelings. So, I mean, it seems a very strange way to run a democracy to say, you know, here's going to be two teams and they're going to be very locked in, and then we're going to let a, you know, a handful of, you know, random folks who are, who are the least politically engaged and the kind of most, most all over the place, somehow render that judgment.

Yeah. Now, one thing that's not as prominent in the book, but I, but I think that complements your analysis is when you layer on top of that a fragmented media landscape where the media themselves become politically identified so that there's a ideological identity to one side, Fox News, another ideological identity to the other side, MSNBC and CNN kind of bouncing in between, and they themselves profit from reinforcing the identity, it makes it even more difficult to imagine the political process with these two polarized parties kind of adjudicating on the basis of good policy as opposed to who's just going to be more effective in blowing up the other side.

Yeah, I think the media is an accelerant of this binary polarization, particularly having a partisan media in a lot of other advanced democracies there is a strong public media that, you know, really kind of sets a set of shared facts that everybody in the country can kind of work around. Whereas, you know, I mean, I guess we have public media, but it's mostly associated with the left. And so what you've seen is, you know, there's certainly a bifurcation of information streams. And conservatives basically over the last 30 years created an entirely separate world of media enterprises because they felt that the mainstream media had a so called liberal bias. At the same time, I think it's important to understand that through most of American history we had partisan media and that it's really only the post war period that had this unique moment in which we had sort of broad nonpartisan media. And that was, you know, some ways a function of there being just one newspaper in a lot of cities that kind of wanted to appeal to everybody. There kind of being three major news networks that were trying to appeal together as well as, you know, the fact that the politics was you know, basically kind of centrist and moderate. And so there was kind of a shared middle. And now there is no shared middle. And there's a media model that says, you know, we're going to judge every single article on its content independently and the more clicks or views or whatever you get, the more revenue you're going to get. So there's a clear media incentive to push the most incendiary, emotional stories because those are the ones that get the most shares. And you know, this is distinct from the fake news problem, which is, you know, I think, you know, another thing to think about. But you know, it's, it's, it's an outrage problem. And I think that's, that's a clear dynamic here, that the, you know, the media has a, you know, a business that's built around outrageous.

Yeah, but it's important. I mean, you're exactly right. Marcus Prior, of course, calls this the period of broadcast democracy. And I think we don't do enough to recognize how significant the image of media produced during the era of broadcast democracy is to us even today. Like we measure everything against this golden age, which of course was obviously not a golden age in a lot of ways. I mean, all sorts of perspectives were not there. All sorts of problems were suppressed, all sorts of lies were, were sustained for many, many cycles. But the point is it was at least a dynamic where there was a norm of neutrality in the press that tried to drive them to present things in a way that would allow all sides to see the story. And that had a Significant effect. If you watch Richard Nixon's impeachment or the popularity of Richard Nixon across the whole of his presidency, you know, for the first period before Watergate appears, Nixon is loved as much as Donald Trump was loved by Republicans. He's hated by Democrats, not as much as Trump was, but, you know, he was not liked by Democrats. But then just at the moment that Watergate really crescendos and, you know, six months before he resigns, you begin to see a fall off in Nixon's support with Republicans and Democrats in a perfectly correlated manner. There's like a story that's being told. The whole world is listening to the same story. It's having a similar effect on everybody. And the consequence is when Nixon's popularity among Republicans crosses the 50 line, 50% line, that's it, he's gone. But if you look at the same thing with Donald Trump, of course, there's no change in support among Republicans for Donald Trump or hatred by Democrats of Donald Trump during the whole of this administration. Because, of course, we're living in radically different stories now. It's true. You're right to say that, of course, before broadcast media, we had polarized partisan media. That was the nature of media all the way back to the beginning of media. But the real difference is the public was invisible back then. Polling only gets born in the mid-1930s. So we have no real way to know what the public, who the public is. I mean, you know, politicians think they know who the public is because they get elected by the public. But it's not, like, constantly present in the debate that 78% of Republicans think X or 85% of Democrats think Y. And so the salience of the partisan division among the public isn't as important to policymaking as it is right now, which reinforces your really important point that it just drives us to the place where politics is stalemated. You have an attitude of dominance on both sides, like, we want to win and then send the other side to Siberia. That's our model of governing, as opposed to a model of governing which drove both sides, or as you idealize it, four sides, to try to figure out how they're going to bring about a result that could actually advance anybody's, or maybe hopefully our collective interest.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I'd say another thing about the earlier era of partisan media is that, you know, it was intensely local in its focus. And, you know, in terms of the issues, you know, they were not issues over, you know, the. The identity of the nation in this sort of, I mean, certain, I mean, certainly there were issues of, of immigration and, you know, stereotyping, but that was not the center of partisan politics. There was not a broad national culture war in which large groups of Democrats or Republicans felt as though if a Democrat or a Republican won the presidency, then the soul of America would be forever polluted and destroyed and irredeemable.

Except for one period.

Except for one period I wanted to. Right.

So the one time when we actually had a visible, national, polarized debate was the time that led us into a civil war where both sides had this national idea about what it meant for the other side to win. And when Lincoln did win, one side said, that's it, we have to leave. And so there could have been a kind of harbinger of like what politics was going to look like when we had these purely polarized and publicly visible or legible publics. We would find ourselves in the middle of such a civil war, or as Biden has termed it, an uncivil war, which is, of course, where we are right now.

Yeah, and you know, that, that 1850s period is a fascinating period, you know, in that it, it's the moment in which the compromise over slavery kind of unravels as slavery kind of becomes a central issue. As westward expansion forces that issue onto the national stage. The Whig party falls apart over it and Lincoln wins the 1860 election, which is a four way election with less than 40% of the popular vote. And the Southern is not even on the ballot in most southern states. And the Southern states say, well, if this is the future of America, then there's no place for us where our voices are not going to be heard. And there's this way in which I don't think anybody expected that the Civil War would wind up with, you know, a four year, you know, bloody, protracted struggle that was just going to be a rebellion that the Union was going to put, be put down. But as, as it kind of expands, you know, it becomes more and more about emancipation and about civil rights and that, you know, many, many Northern northerners who, you know, wouldn't have cared all that much about slavery or, you know, or the civil rights of black voters start to care a lot more about it. And many Southerners, who, the majority of Southerners were not slaveholders, start to feel like their whole way of life and their whole identity is at stake. And the more you get dug into that, the more you feel like you have to rationalize that you are part of some greater struggle in order to, to say that it's all worth it. And I think you can see a similar dynamic playing out now in American politics.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Now I want to move to what I think is most surprising to people when they think about, when they recognize it. I mean, I think your evidence is pretty compelling. But when you think about the fact that in some sense the most successful modern period of American democracy is a period where effectively, we have four parties or there's four shadow parties under the guise of Democrats and Republicans, and you have this era where that fact produces a certain discipline among members of Congress. So Lyndon Johnson, when he was majority leader of the Senate, was said by his press secretary, George Reedy, to have never been willing to bring a, quote, Democratic bill to the floor of the Senate. Like every bill had to be a bill that in some sense at least presented itself as speaking for both parties. But of course it was easier to do that because the parties were diverse as opposed whether, you know, there was liberal and conservative in each party. But the point that you bring out, and I think it's so powerful, is that that actually changes the game for being a member of Congress. Like, you realize the only thing you can be doing, you don't speak for the nation as the liberal Republican or as the conservative Democrat. You don't plausibly say, I represent America. You just say, I just represent the people like me. And we're going to do what we can to get something done. So to do that, we're going to have to strike a deal, and we're going to have to strike a deal with people we don't agree with. But that's just the nature of politics. And that whole conception is kind of almost traitorous on both the right and the left right now. Like the idea that you would say to people your job is to strike deals with people you don't agree with, to figure out what we're going to do to make America better, they would say, no, no, I'm not going to compromise. I'm going to hold. I'm going to hold firm on my ideals. So is it the four party ness that made that possible, or is it something not as structural that made that possible?

No, I think it's fundamentally the heterogeneity of both political parties and the overlapping nature of their, the ideological coalitions within the parties. Because, I mean, the important thing is, is that that shapes how Congress operates. I mean, if you look at the, you know, the Congress of that era, particularly the Senate, not only under lbj, but also under Mike Mansfield, who was the leader after that, the Senate, to a large extent, the House is a much more free flowing place. And the reason for that is that there's not a lot of opportunity for party discipline because there's very little that the party agrees on. So the role of a leader is just to kind of play a little bit of traffic cop, not to have a very disciplined party agenda, because there is no disciplined party agenda, because there's not a whole lot that the party entirety agrees on. And that creates a Congress that is much more committee based and even subcommittee based. And in that framework, there's a lot of opportunity for legislators across a broad spectrum to hash out broad, you know, bipartisan legislation that's not, you know, controlled by the party leaders. Now what happens, you know, starting in the, in the 70s, is that there's a lot of pressure in the Democratic Party to start to purge some of the more conservative Democrats from committee positions. And that involves, you know, some delegation to party leadership in order to structure voting particularly. I mean, this starts in the House, but then it moves over to the Senate. And the idea is that we want strong leaders because as the Democratic Party becomes a little bit more liberal, we want Democratic Party to be able to pass more liberal bills. And that means that we can't let these Southern conservatives on committees bottle stuff up. We need to give power. And that creates a sense increasingly into the 80s among a growing number of conservative Republicans that their views are being shut out. And that's where Gingrich takes his oppositional energy. The other important thing to understand about, about that period, you know, from the mid-60s, you know, really through the late 80s, is that that's a period really starting in 68, in which it seems like Republicans kind of have a lock on the presidency and that Democrats, you know, have controlled the House, you know, for a long time. Democrats basically had unified control of the House from 1932 up through 1992, with a few years of Republican control in the 50s. And so there's a sense that this is just sort of the divided government nature of the American people, that they want a president who's a Republican, who's going to be strong on foreign policy, who's going to put some discipline on the spending of the Congress. But they also want Democrats in Congress who are going to make sure that they spend on local programs. And you have a lot of split districts. I mean, in 1984, when Reagan wins in a landslide and overwhelming landslide, there's still a very strong Democratic House and a lot of members in the House who are Democrats, but represent districts that voted for Republicans. So you also have a lot of pressure for Democrats and Republicans to work together there. And so you can do a major bill like the 1986 tax bill. And what's changed is that every election now is up for grabs. There's more and more delegation within both parties to the leaders and both the House and the Senate. And so the leaders want to draw sharp distinctions between the two parties. If you're in the minority party, you don't want to compromise. McConnell famously said in 2010 that he didn't want to be involved in the Affordable Care act because he didn't want to give it the legitimacy of bipartisanship.

Yeah, but. But if you put together your two books, you know, I think there's a story of. This is a very sexist word, but let me use it. The emasculation of members of Congress, like. So the first part of that story, you've just described the way in the 70s, there's a shift to leadership away from members. So members, you know, used to be relatively independent people who knew something, people who were there for a long time and became expert in a certain field, and they. And they exercise their influence to kind of guide policy according to their judgment. But then that shifts to the leadership. And then the Gingrich revolution forces the change that you describe in the book about lobbying, where Gingrich immediately slashes the support from members of Congress from internal to Congress, and forces them to turn outwards to the lobbyist to figure out what the bills even mean or what they should be doing, so that the locus of power is both shifting to leadership and then shifting outside of Congress until we get to the kind of member of Congress in the 1990s, the modal member of Congress in the 1990s, somebody who's spending half his or her time on a telephone calling people to raise money for their party, as opposed to being a legislator who exercises judgment about what's actually in the interest of America. And then, of course, in that context, they have to be extremely loyal to their base. The 2000s exacerbates that, because to the extent you're raising money and you're raising money increasingly in small dollars, you've got to sustain the image, and it makes it harder and harder to be a more complicated, subtle, reflective member and easier to become, you know, either on the far left or on the far right. So it's a slow destruction of who Congresspeople are that in some place is some ways playing into the dynamic you're describing.

Well, yes, absolutely. And I mean, the other thing that Gingrich importantly does in 1994 is he nationalizes congressional elections so that it becomes very hard for individual members to run as sort of connected to a particular district or place. And this increasing nationalization of American party politics continues apace, but fundamentally tied up with the money. Because what happens in the, you know, I mean, Gingrich is, you know, again, I think we sometimes tend to overrate Gingrich as a transformative figure without understanding what he the sort of context in which Gingrich arises. But, you know, if we go back to the early 80s, what you see is the rise of these massive party committees which are just raising tons and tons of money, which is, you know, coming from very wealthy donors, for the most part, corporate donors, and is going straight into advertising. And so you have this rise of this consultant class which is basically standardizing the messaging for candidates. So, you know, in the past, candidates would, you know, wouldn't spend all that much money on advertising or television. They would have local organizations, they would have local political parties that were connected to community groups and much closer to their constituents. But the sort of collapse of local political parties and the rise of television shifts the way in which campaigning happens makes money more important. Parties pick up on this. They standardize the message and they nationalize the message. And so that's, you know, Gingrich is really just picking up on those trends and just kind of turning it up another notch. You know, it's much more deliberate about trying to bring corporations in to fund the Republican Party and to give them special privileges and writing of legislative legislation because he thinks that's the way to make Republicans more successful. I mean, Democrats are guilty of a lot of this, too, in the 90s. And that, of course, drives increasing inequality in our economy as the public policy apparatus moves towards the very well off. And that makes easier for the parties to raise money, makes them more attuned, makes the many people angrier at politics because they feel like they're not being represented, which then further fuels polarization because the goal, particularly of the Republican Party is to put more of the emphasis on cultural issues, which drives anger and donations and distracts people from the ways in which the Republican Party is selling them out. But also, to some extent, the Democratic Party. And there's sort of this, you know, agreement on a broad neoliberal agenda, which means that the parties become more focused on the cultural fight, which is particularly important to their donors. And all of this kind of feeds on itself. And there's a bunch of, bunch of forces that are all reinforcing each other in this.

Yeah, okay, so. So it's very convincing that we're in this awful place because of all of these forces. And I think your book is very convincing about where it would be better to be in a world with multiple parties that were competing in a way that was similar to the way competition might have happened in the 1960s. The moment of anxiety though, is getting from here to there. I mean, I can, you know, when I read your book, I was in the middle of writing a piece that tried to articulate a particular strategy to bring about multiple parties. I thought there was a particular innovation that could bring it about and it would bring about the easy division of Republicans and the division of Democrats. And then I decided I didn't want to publish it because I actually am not sure that's what I want to happen right now. I mean, it's hard to give up the old ways or the whole way of thinking because it feels like we're in such a critical moment right now. And so, you know, do you continue to feel like you can with, with, you know, full force and conviction, say Democrats divide and Republicans. I mean, it might be easier to say Republicans divide because we see a clear division in the Republican Party, but in the Democratic Party, even if there's an ideological division, there seems to be much more cohesion right now. And I just wonder whether it still feels like the right step to be taking in the next, let's say, four years.

Well, I think it is. I mean, you know, obviously I think the most urgent thing is to pass HR1. I mean that, that is the thing that's right in front of us. And you know, I think that's extremely important legislation. But you know, I think that, you know, even with the passage of HR1, you know, I'm not entirely sure that Democrats hold the House or the Senate. And I think we continue to be stuck in this moment in which power continues to shift back and forth and the Republican Party becomes even more radicalized and illiberal. And the danger of that to me is the most pressing danger, that what we have right now is a party that is being dominated by a worldview that is become fundamentally conspiracy minded, liberal and anti Democratic. And you know, it. In some ways it's the two party system that created that because there was no other alternative for folks on the right as Donald Trump took over the party other than to kind of fall into line. But I think the crucial continuation of democracy depends on a conservative party that believes in pluralism, that believes in elections, that is not enthralled to whatever conspiracy happens to be circulating that justifies their role as heroes of American democracy. And the only way to allow for that can conservative party to win enough seats that it can get into government is to have a more proportional system of voting. And you know, I think it's also important. I mean, political parties give people identities and that right now, unless you're a Democrat, you're a Republican or you're, you know, somehow outside of politics and there ought to be another identity that you can have on the right that's not fully Trumpist. I think there are a lot of folks who just kind of follow politics in a very passive way who might be attracted to a different identity that's not full on Trump culture war kind of paranoid garbage. But you know, there's no, there's no alternative for that. I mean, you look at, you know, European democracies and there are certainly far right, you know, xenophobic liberal parties, you know, but they're at 15, 20% and you have governing coalitions that form, that exclude them. I mean, if the left splits up into a social Democratic party and a, you know, more moderate pro business Democratic Party, they might compete separately electorally, but they almost certainly work together in government. And I think they'd probably both be stronger without each other in the sense that the centrist Democratic Party could run without being attached to abolish the police message. In a more progressive Social Democratic party party could run without having to apologize for the more pro corporate wing of the party. They could reach different voters and I think that would actually help them as well as, you know, there could be a few other parties that would form. It would also mean, I mean for, for Democrats, I think especially, you know, the single winner system is really bad for the party of the cities. And there's a wonderful book by Jonathan Rod and Stanford professor called why Cities Lose, which is, you know, a very thorough discussion of the ways in which single member districts punish the party of the cities because their votes are just distributed a lot less efficiently. It also, you know, more proportional system would also effectively render gerrymandering useless or at best marginal.

So we certainly agree about the critical need to pass HR1 and we agree that even if we pass HR1, the Democrats might lose. I would say we should complement that recognition by saying that if we don't pass HR1, then the combination of vote suppression bills and gerrymandering means the Democrats will almost certainly lose. Even though the Republicans have fewer votes. So we, you know, we could, we could plausibly enter a stage of minoritarian government in the United States with a Supreme Court that says it's not our job to fix your problems.

And that could last at least a decade.

Yeah, yeah. The other. But the other point that I think is really important about you endorsing HR1 so strongly is that you actually describe a package of reform very close to the reform that, you know, I put together as the Citizen Equality act of 19 of 2017, which is not quite HR1. I mean, it has a public funding component. You support public funding? I support public funding. I'm much more enamored of vouchers because I think that chance for amplifying the extremes is less. But you know, that's, that might be a quibble, but what we agree on is the really valuable innovation of multi member ranked choice districts, which of course HR1 doesn't establish. HR1 keeps us in our single member districts. It just eliminates part of the partisan input into the gerrymandering process. So it's not quite as much as we want. And then obviously we all agree that we need fundamental protection for the right to vote. The John Lewis Act, I think, you know, which is Title one here and part of Title two is, is essential. But, but it is striking that there's still more work to be done. Even if we got HR1 to get us to the place that you want us to be where the forces of diversity could manifest themselves as multiple parties rather than continue to be in the structure of this doom loop.

Right. And I mean, I should say there is legislation, the Fair Representation act, which was 4,000, HR 4,000 last Congress and will be reintroduced in the current Congress that would do a lot of this and I think the new version will be even, even better. So I think that's something that a lot that more and more people are looking towards. I mean, I think the challenge is that for a lot of folks this is a new idea and it's not something that they've thought a lot about. It's not an idea that has been kicking around for over a decade. Most, most of the provisions in HR1 are not new ideas. They're ideas that have been the mainstay of good governing commissions and good government groups and have sort of all the endorsements, people have run all the traps on them. So in many ways all the policies there are in the sort of late stage of policy development.

Yes.

And I think a lot of folks don't really understand what multi member districts are or if they think about them, they think about them in the context of at large voting, which was used to undermine vote of minorities in an earlier era. And you know, this is fundamentally different. When you have a proportional voting system and you have ranked choice voting, it actually elevates the voices of minority constituents because it, you know, it means that they don't have to be in majority minority districts in order to elect their candidate of choice. You know, it solves fundamental problems around both racial and partisan gerrymandering. And you know, it means that everybody gets to vote in a competitive election. And I think that's the most important thing is that, you know, we've talked a lot about ways to increase voter participation for a long, long time in the U.S. and you know, it seems like most of these interventions only move the needle at the margins. And there's a very simple reason for that, which is that people are not idiots and they know when their vote doesn't matter because they live in a district that's overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican. And a lot of folks also are pretty dissatisfied with the two parties. So why am I going to vote when it doesn't make all that much a, of much of a difference for people like me this recent election, I think more people felt that it did make a difference, which is why there's a high level of turnout. But in a system of single winner elections, the majority of districts and states are safe for one party or the other. So the parties themselves don't invest in turnout. They don't invest in building local organizations, organizations that would engage citizens. And the elected officials themselves are not all that accountable because they have basically safe seats. And as long as they can make sure to fend off a primary challenger, which most of them do successfully, they're golden.

So under HR1, are you encouraged that the existing structure HR1 describes would encourage third parties? I mean, like the Green Party has been very skeptical and some have been quite vocal in opposing HR1 because they think it's going to make it harder for them to run presidential candidates. I mean, do you think that's just mistaken or.

I mean, I don't. It seems, seems like a small quibble, you know. And you know, the. Yeah, I mean, certainly we should have more ballot access, you know, for, for multiple parties. I mean, but you know, particularly I'd encourage the parties to be focusing on local elections and even congressional elections. I mean, you know, you're not going to have a third party candidate for president until we fundamentally change how we Elect the president, but you might have more third parties running, success successfully in Congress. And you know, broadly, I mean, I think the Green Party and others are broadly supportive of reforms that would move us to a more proportional system, multi member districts and ranked choice voting. And that's, you know, I think that's the next generation of reforms. And I think more and more folks in the democracy speak space have been thinking about this and have warmed up to the idea or at least are asking the right questions about it. So I think that's where the conversation is moving.

So that would be the HR4000. I mean, if HR1 passes, what's the next public funding reform?

What's the next public funding reform? So HR1 will have the 6 to 1 match for public financing for small dollars, which I think is a potentially transformative move that shifts the way in which campaigns are funded. Although I think in many ways we're already a lot of the way there as more and more money is raised online through these sort of Act Blue or Win Red, you know, style, style packs. So I'm, I'm sort of uncertain where that, where, how, how that is changing campaigns for the long run because I think it's now easier than ever to raise a lot of money from small donors. I mean, you look at the success of the Sanders campaign, it was somewhat remarkable. And I don't think Sanders could have even, could have raised that much money eight years ago. There's been a sort of transformation, so I'm not sure, to be honest. Curious what you think.

Well, I'll have to be on your podcast to explain what I think, but we're at the end and I'm really grateful for your book and thank you. It's important, it's an important set of ideas to have out there right now and to get people to begin to understand and rally around because I think you're right about what the right solution looks like, even if we're not yet clear about how we get there. And I'm really happy to join the fight for HR4000 once we have HR1. Yes, well, so that's, that's very important.

Me too. I'm more focused on HR1 right now, but. Yeah, yeah, but.

Okay. Well, so thank you so much, Lee, and we look forward to the next book.

All right, well, it was a real pleasure to have this conversation. I really enjoyed it.

That's our episode. This is a series, as we've announced frequently filling out the argument for HR1. And as you heard here in this interview, Lee Drutman also believes the critical next step is HR1. Even though we all agree there's work to be done after HR1 has passed, we will continue this conversation about the critical points, arguing for the urgent need for HR1. And we're going to work. I'm going to work. Who's the we? I'm going to work here to include again some more conversations from people who find themselves or believe themselves to be on the other side. It's a striking moment on that side this week. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell, who had celebrated Citizens United as one of the greatest decisions of the Supreme Court empowering corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in politics. Mitch McConnell has now decided that the corporation should shut up. And if that's not bad enough, they're talking about special taxes that the government should pass to punish these corporations for speaking in ways that the Republicans or Mitch McConnell doesn't like. So it's a striking moment to realize that we're not only in a moment where people believe unlimited money should have voice, they also believe the government should be disciplining unlimited money when the voice it exercises is not one the government likes. If there would be one fundamental idea we should be able to agree on, it's that there's no role for government in picking sides in a debate and punishing the side it doesn't like. Maybe at the extremes. What I've spoken about is militant democracy on some of these podcasts where the democracy protects itself against anti democratic influence. Okay, maybe at the extremes, but when we're talking about core democratic policy issues, the idea that the government would punish through taxes, a side in the debate it does not like, that ought to be something that people on the left and the right agree is fundamentally un American. Yet that's where we are. It's the beginning of April 2021. Let's see what progress we can make. These podcasts are produced by citizens us. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us Anotherway. Please go there. It's such an interesting webpage. Maybe the. I mean, you know, objectively you can Google this. The most interesting webpage in, well, Cambridge. Let's say that the most interesting webpage in Cam. Well, okay, maybe one of the top 10 most interesting webpages in Cambridge. But the point is it's a really interesting page because on that page you can say, here's what you should be talking about, or here's who you should be talking to, or here are the ideas you've got to start considering more carefully because you obviously don't yet get it. That's the feedback I love to receive. And that's what we gotta, gotta find a way to encourage more of because this has to be less read only and more read write. So go there, give your feedback, find the link to share this podcast and let's find more who can join this conversation. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week, I'm hoping, pending the agreement of the next interviewee, which I'm hoping I'm going to see when I open my email right now. This is Larry Lessig. Thanks for listening, Sam.