No Labels, Polarization, and Reform with Bill Galston

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig, and this, after long silence, is another episode of the podcast Another Way. It's been a long silence because I guess I have to confess that it took a long time to recover a sense of where we should be going since the failure of reform in Congress occurred. And that failure happened when the Senate refused at the beginning of the year to to modify the filibuster rule to permit the Senate to vote on the Freedom to Vote act, which was the Joe Manchin version of the for the People Act. That failure and the arguments that defended that failure had a profound impact on me. And in the six months or five months since that time, I've been working to direct my writing and thinking on the question of how we should be responding. But I wanted to continue this conversation on this podcast to think about reform with a conversation with one of the leaders of an organization that has triggered in many a deep cynicism or skepticism about reform organizations or reform in particular. And that organization is no Labels, which was founded just after 2010 with a wide range of leaders who said they were trying to take on and address the problem of partisan polarization in in Congress to build counter forces, influences that might facilitate a Congress that could work together. And Bill Galston was one of those founders of that organization, no Labels. I wanted to have a conversation with Bill because I've had for the whole of my career enormous respect for his work, his practical work, first in the Clinton administration, but also with many candidates to get them to think about important issues of public policy in a constructive, productive way. And I wanted to talk to him about no Labels and its relationship to reform because as I've written about and spoken about in earlier conversations in this podcast, no Labels has been characterized as an organization channeling large contributions in a direction to facilitate particular kinds of legislative action that don't include legislative action to making the system more representative or more well functioning. In particular, last June, June 16, 2021, there was a recording of a conversation of a meeting hosted by no Labels with supporters of no Labels and Joe Manchin describing the issues inside of Congress, including the issues related to reform. And in that conversation, the leader leaders of no Labels in particular, one of its co founders, Andrew Bersky, described the leverage which the organization had because the organization could channel such extraordinary amounts of money, up to $50,000 per member, to get members to defend the issues that no Labels advances. Now, of course, that's what every political organization does inside of Washington. That's the nature of the problem in Washington. But what was striking to me was to think about an organization like no Labels, launched for the purpose of making the system work better, using the system, depending on the system, and to the extent they resisted reform of the filibuster, slowing the improvement of the system so that it can't address the problems that we face in any way better. So this is the conversation with Bill Galston. If you've not heard of Bill Galston, it's surprising because he's been on the field forever. He holds a chair of Governance study, the Ezra K. Zylka Chair in Government Studies at the Brookings Institute. But before Brookings, which he joined in 2006, he was a professor at the University of Maryland and a professor of political science at the University of Texas. His specialty is public policy and political philosophy as it relates to political institutions. In that capacity, he's written an extraordinary range of books, nine books, more than 100 articles in the field. The most recent book is Anti Pluralism, the Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy, that was published in 2018. But he was a deputy assistant for domestic policy under Bill Clinton during the Clinton administration and adviser to Al Gore, and really, I think the intellectual leader behind no Labels. This conversation with him tries to unpack what the purpose and theory of change for no Labels was. As you'll hear at the end, it includes an effort to force a reckoning about the question of reform and the role that no Labels will play. I'll confess that after the conversation, I'm more optimistic and more depressed. I'm more optimistic because I hear and understand the realism in what Bill Galston will explain here. The desire to read this as a cynical truth. This organization pushing the name of reform but really aiming for cynical, partisan or money focused victories is less plausible in light of the account that Bill Galston offers. But I'm more depressed because the reality is it's hard to see how we push beyond this broken and corrupted institution when even the most successful internal reformers of the institution take it as obvious that they need to rely upon the structural corruption in order to achieve their objectives. How do we get beyond that? Well, the answer to that question is for later conversations. Let's now shift to the conversation with Bill Galston, and afterwards I'll come back with some reflections. So, Bill Galston, thank you so much for talking. I wanted this conversation to introduce people to the organization no Labels, which you were instrumental in helping to found. It's had a long life. I want to start by just going back to its Birth and having you just tell us a story about what got you and others like Mark McKinnon together to think about how they should form an organization to do something different from what was already happening.

There was a group of us back then, very diverse politically. We weren't all political pundits or fundraisers. We were all over the map. But we agreed on two things. First of all, that the widening polarization of American party politics, which was evident even at the time we're talking now about late 2010, was not healthy for our democracy, certainly wasn't good for the legislative process, was not good for public trust. It was bad for all reasons. Secondly, otherwise we would have just shrugged. We thought that at least in principle, there was something that could be done about it. I'll be frank. When we started, it was an experiment. It still is, but we thought that something could be done about it. We didn't know exactly what that something was. We understood that we were just going to have to get started and then fumble our way forward. And over a period of X years, we had no idea what the value of X was, that we would gradually figure out how to be effective. Where the sweet spots might be for the crafting of counterweights, I won't say cures for or antidotes to, but counterweights to this tendency that we did not see as positive for anything we cared about.

You obviously been a professor for many years before that at Texas and at Maryland. Before you came to Brookings, you'd been thinking about political philosophy, but practical political philosophy spent years in the Clinton administration. When you looked at the problem of polarization, did you have a theory of what was driving the polarization? What accounted for this pathological change that I think we all observe was bad then is worse now?

Well, I am guilty as charged. I spent more than 30 years as an academic in two large public institutions. I'm a political philosopher by training, and I have not abandoned the trade of my youth, but I have diluted it with a few other things. It wasn't just that I was in the Clinton White House. I'd been involved before, no labels, in half a dozen presidential campaigns. And so I understood something about practical politics from those campaigns, from my two and a half years in the Clinton White House in a fairly, though not awesomely senior position. And so I was able to bring together some scholarship on the history of American politics, some political theories, some constitutional theory with the practicalities that I saw around me. I mean, I have, you know, I have a 50 minute lecture that I will spare you and everybody else, because this is. This is not the occasion. But I'm 76, which means I was born just a few months after the end of World War II. And so I actually lived through a period of what's now called consensus politics and witnessed its gradual transformation into whatever the opposite of consensus politics is. Polarization is term that's usually used, but others could pick a different term. There are all sorts of things that set this in motion. In my judgment, this breakdown began in the middle of the 1960s and has continued in fits and starts ever since. Sometimes there are abrupt, almost step functional changes of the political system in the direction of polarization, as there certainly were starting in the late 1960s with the Vietnam War. The rise of the counterculture, which put cultural issues on the public agenda for the first time in a very long time. The breakdown of the consensus on Keynesian economics, which occurred in the 1970s in response to the great stagflation of that period. The emerging centrality of racial issues,

which

certainly has its roots in the mid-1960s. We tend to focus on 1965 as the year of the Voting Rights act, which of course it was. But something else equally Momentous happened in 1965, which was the passage of the Immigration Reform Bill, which reopened the gates of immigration to America after it had been slammed almost shut for 40 years. 41 to be precise. It's 1924. And not only did the flow of immigrants accelerate, but also the doors were open to immigrants from places that had hardly been represented in the American population at all. I think the immigration reform acted as a demographic time release capsule and gradually transformed the demography of the United States and equally significantly, the demography of the electorate. By the mid-1980s, a lot of people had begun to notice these changes, and they began to ask, well, when did this happen? I don't recall talking about this or voting for this. Who made this happen and why is it being permitted? It's not good for me economically. It is threatening not only my place in society, but also the nature of American culture, et cetera, et cetera. All of this was happening then, starting in the 1990s. And I date the next wave of polarization to the 1994 midterm elections, the Gingrich revolt, which led Republicans out of the desert for the first time in a biblical 40 years. And then obviously, the reaction to the failed invasion of Iraq, the reaction to Barack Obama's election, and one other thing, the formation of what I'll call an aggrieved working class consciousness in response to the evisceration of the manufacturing sector of the United States, which, contrary to popular belief, did not begin in the Clinton administration, which actually created manufacturing jobs in those eight years, but in the presidency of George W. Bush, during which we lost more than four and a half million manufacturing jobs, which we've never regained. So I could go on, but I think the current polarization is a sea of trouble that has been fed by numerous rivers, some of which I've just ticked off very briefly. So that's my theory of the case.

Well, okay, so let's talk about two of them. Let's highlight two things that you've just described, but I want to push you on a third. Obviously, 1965 is critical because it begins a really important ideological realignment of the or the ideological purity inside of the party. I mean, remember Johnson recognizing that passing the Civil Rights bill and passing the Voting Rights bill was certain to weaken the Democratic Party in the south, and that facilitated the ideological reordering of the parties to be ideological parties, which. Which they basically had not been prior to that point. So this is one key driver that we have ideological parties. The second is Newt Gingrich. Absolutely. I think we don't really recognize, and we need to talk more about the way that he changed Congress to become an engine of ideology by pushing people into the business of fundraising and stopping them from working with other people on the other side of the aisle. That's incredibly important. But the part that I think people are just stunned by is almost the epistemological polarization, like the idea that we live in a world where more than half of Republicans today believe that the election of Joe Biden was stolen. That's not because of immigrants. That's not because of Newt Gingrich. That's because of something much more fundamental. And I wonder, when you look at that, whether you have any way of understanding what's driving that or what's making that possible in a way that I don't think in 1965 we could have imagined that happening.

Well, that's fair enough. And the colleague two doors down the hall, Jonathan Rauch, has just written a big book on that, and obviously it's a massive phenomenon. I actually see that as more a consequence of the polarization that I've described than a cause. The more polarized you are, and this is by now conventional wisdom, I think it has, as Henry Kissinger once said, the additional merit of truth, but that we tend to be more in bubbles. We tend to spend a lot more time listening to and talking with people of our own tribe than conducting cross tribal conversations. The shift in the nature of the media has clearly facilitated that. When I was growing up, you couldn't make money narrow casting, you had to be a broadcaster. And that's why the nightly news shows on all three networks, two and a half to begin with and finally three when ABC matured, were very similar to one another because people were going through the same calculations in the boardrooms and in and in the newsrooms and they were trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience. And that drove certain familiar features of news and information presentation as it stood half a century ago. Polarization plus changing technology has made it possible to make a lot of money with one side of the truth and often only remotely connected to the truth. That has made a lot of bad problems worse. It has intensified the problem of what I'll call cross tribal persuasion. And the higher the cost to benefit ratio is of efforts to engage in cross tribal persuasion, the more likely you are to embark on a strategy of intensification as well, mobilization rather than persuasion. And that has driven a lot of obnoxious recent phenomena in American politics. And I am not sitting here brimming with optimistic responses to this polarization. I don't think it can go on this way indefinitely. But if you press me as to how it's going to end, I don't know in that respect, it's a little bit like the war in Ukraine.

I would say, yeah, no, no nuclear weapons at the end of this fight. But maybe something just as, I don't

know, there are political equivalents. Yes, which is why they're sometimes called nuclear options, because in order to save the country, you have to blow it up.

No, I think your point about the, as you describe it, the narrow casting versus broadcasting is critical. I mean, there's a extraordinary story of Roger Ailes, who of course, when he worked for Nixon, Nixon said to him, I need a Pravda, as he was admiring Brezhnev's support inside of the Soviet Union. And then he goes off and launches Fox News. But his most important contribution to the launch of Fox News was to steer them away from trying to become a cable version of broadcast news and instead become a niche broadcaster, a narrow caster to a conservative base. Which of course, if you look at the ideological content of the cable news networks, after that happens, they all begin to veer into their own little corner as they try to define their audience and maintain their audience. It's a critical part of the problem. So I agree but then what's interesting to me when we think about that as the problem is again, going back to no labels now, label steps in and has a theory of change about how they're going to respond to try to knit together a better functioning government and in particular Congress. And I just wonder, just walk us through how you thought the interventions you might push and you've been very successful in creating organization or structures like the caucuses inside of Congress to try to bring this about, but how you thought those might respond to the particular kind of problem you were observing.

Okay. Our theory of the case stripped to its essentials is that as the parties of PolP have polarized, a lot of people in the electorate have felt increasingly displaced or even no placed by the polarization. They look at what the polarized parties are saying, how they're saying it, the options that they're presenting, and they say to themselves, I don't recognize myself in either of these messages, in either of these agendas. I am always holding my nose, I wish hope against hope that one day I'll get to vote for an agenda that I really believe in. At the risk of causing some controversy, let me wade into the hottest topic on the current policy agenda. As an example, I'm talking about abortion. I recently conducted an extensive review of public opinion sources on abortion. The majority of the country is nowhere near the center of gravity of the two political parties on this issue. They are quite literally unrepresented. If I were to characterize the center of gravity of the population as opposed to the partisan competition, I would put it a click to the right of Roe v. Wade. That is to say, most people are very comfortable with the trimester formula. They are a little bit more concerned about the second trimester than Roe was and in favor of more restrictions on abortions in the second trimester that Roe contemplated, but within hailing distance of Roe, which is why a solid majority is in favor of maintaining it. On the other hand, if you look at the bill that the Senate majority leader brought to the floor a few days ago, which got nowhere, it doesn't codify Roe. It goes well beyond Roe and is two clicks to the left of Roe for all sorts. And I don't have time to go into detail. So you have a center of gravity in the country that's unrepresented by the positions of the Republican Party, which extend, we can now see far beyond the abolition of Roe. A lot of red state governors have let the cats out of the bags recently and have revealed that they have ambitions that Extend perhaps to contraception and a bunch of other things. We have two parties that have become increasingly radical on this divisive subject. They've abandoned where the majority of the American people are, and that is causing a fair amount of discontent. Now just extend that process or that template to a bunch of other things in society. Part one of our theory of the case was that that unrepresented portion of the population existed. The second part of our theory of the case was that that was especially true in, in the Congress of the United States, where you had a cadre of legislators that really hated what the House and Senate were becoming and had become. That they came to Washington as people who were accustomed to getting things done in various walks of life, including in state legislatures. But many of them came from businesses, the armed forces, et cetera, and they simply didn't understand a process that led over and over again to no outcome, no result, no accomplishment. That wasn't what they came to Washington to do. Talk about stories when we were starting out, we heard story after story of how legislators from different parties, when they arrived in Washington for the first time, were herded into the equivalent of partisan cattle chutes and funneled off into one party activities starting on day one of their orientation. When we put together our first group, first bipartisan group in the House of Representatives, we didn't set them up to do anything except to get to know each other. And many of them said to us not soon after we began, you know, this is the first time I've had a talk with a member of the other party, represented the other party since I got to Washington X years ago, and X might have been 1, 3, 5, but there were some veteran legislators there who said that it had been years since they'd had a conversation. And after a little bit of, actually after more than a little bit of trust formation, which was one of the major objects during you can't have serious conversations with people you don't trust. But trust doesn't just materialize because you have people in the same room. They need to get to know each other, do some easy things together, and then you gradually move the rheostat up and you ask them to get more and more serious, first of all with low hanging legislative issues, and then eventually with larger and more complicated ones. So it was a process that lasted years. It had its skeptics and detractors all along, but it got to be a going concern. It is a tree with some fruits. For example, this current Congress, in the first year, I guess the first year of its operation. I can't remember when now managed to enact a very large decades long infrastructure bill, investing more than a trillion dollars in parts of the country that are actually critical to commerce, to transportation and communication, which had been neglected for a generation. It was this bipartisan group that no labels put together that made that bill happen. That was the group that sat together, went over the proposed budget for the bill, line by line, asked themselves, is this necessary? Is this the best way to accomplish X? Because we agree that X needs to be done, is this the best way? They came up with a detailed framework for the bill that became the legislative vehicle for the passage of a very significant piece of legislation. We have helped to spearhead another potentially significant piece of legislation, the Investment and Competitiveness act, which if the House and Senate can resolve their differences, would get the United States, for example, back into the business of encouraging domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing, which has turned out to be a huge bottleneck in the global production system, et cetera. So it was a process that took the better part of a decade to turn into something really meaningful, but it has produced and is producing some real results, Contrary to the beliefs of skeptics who said that the system was so totally and unfixably polarized that nothing could get done and that we would have to wait for things to get much worse before there was any hope that they would get better.

Yeah, and I think those are genuinely important accomplishments. And the problem solver caucus, just by meeting and talking about whether there's a way to solve problems in a cross partisan way, is a solution, whether it achieves anything at all, at least focuses people on the character of the problem. But I want to bring it back to the theory of the case because, I mean, one of the most dramatic changes in the character of Congress happened just at the time that you started. No labels. And that was the Republican parties forgetting that there was a problem called climate change. You know, before 2010, we had real Republicans. I mean, John McCain had a climate change bill like he thought was better than Barack Obama's. But in 2010, the Koch brothers made it known that if any Republican acknowledged and pushed climate change as an issue, they would be primaried. And almost overnight, within four years, the party's willingness to talk about that issue, even acknowledge the problem that would need to be solved, changed dramatically. And so the people who constitute Congress, the people who you might try to get into a problem solving solver caucus, were wedded to a view of the world, which I'm pretty confident you don't share and unavoidably so, because they knew that their political existence depended upon them denying what I think you and I believe is a fundamental truth. When you think about the theory of how you're going to bring about a change of Congress, I guess the question is, can you solve the one without addressing the other? Can you solve the problem of polarization without thinking about the economy of influence that's going to produce a Congress that for certain issues is just not even capable of addressing the issues?

Good question, and not an unexpected one. I have a confession to make. I am a political realist in a very precise sense. I. I believe in looking at a situation, accepting certain fixed points in that situation, however unpleasant and counterproductive they are, and then trying to reach solutions that don't wave the magic wand and don't assume, as the economists on the desert island famously did, a can opener.

Look,

if I thought that there were a legislative fix for what you're calling the economy of influence that the Supreme Court would allow to stand, I'd be going gung ho for it. But I think that the Chinese torture that's been inflicted on the McCain Feingold bill is a pretty good indicator of the likely fate of many of those efforts. I'm not an expert in the area, and I'll defer to you because you've put a lot more study into this than I have. But what I'm counting on in the case of climate change is reality therapy administered to vulnerable populations and eventually to their elected representatives, including governors of states that are being visibly affected by it. Let me give you an example. I have noted with interest an interesting shift in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rhetoric on the issue of climate change. Why? Because coastal Florida is increasingly endangered, and that is a challenge to society. It's also a challenge to Florida's economy. It's increasingly a challenge to the real estate sector of places like Miami Beach. I could go on. And it's also the case that Florida is an increasingly red state, which is not as dependent on fossil fuel production as many other red states states are. And so his rhetoric on the issue has become more accommodating. Similarly, I've noticed just recently spontaneous expressions of concern by farmers in a lot of red states who are noticing weather events, droughts, floods, tornadoes, occurring at a frequency. These are veteran farmers in 60s, 70s, even 80s, in some cases, a frequency that they had never observed before. I am an optimist that when a problem becomes undeniable and significantly affects the lives and interests of people, regardless of their party or partisan affiliation, that change will occur. Would it be better if we didn't have to go through this extended process of reality therapy? Yes, it would. And I think there are ways that people who believe in reality can nudge this process along. We're not going to be doing it by expelling the Koch brothers from politics. That's simply not going to happen. So I think we have to live with it and work with it and work around it and work against it.

Well, I mean, let's think about how to work around it. I mean, we can bracket for a second the point you made about whether there's something the Supreme Court would accept. I won't agree with the characterization that there isn't. But put that aside. Let's think about a very practical issue which you wrote about quite convincingly right at the birth of no labels. But at least the way no labels is characterized right now, the organization seems to be taking the opposite position. And that's the question of the filibuster. As you wrote in 2011, the filibuster has evolved into a mechanism that defeats the capacity of Congress, the Senate, and therefore Congress to address important issues. And it wasn't intended to function like this. It's not the Mr. Smith goes to Washington filibuster. It's not Strom Thurmond's filibuster. It's a filibuster that basically stops the ability of Congress to address issues. And the piece that's still on the no Label site argues in favor of reform and marching back to at least the talking filibuster as a way to make it so that problems can be addressed. Is no labels position your position, or is no labels against the idea of filibuster reform?

No, to the best of my knowledge, it is not against filibuster reform. It is against filibuster abolition. And so I'll speak for myself here because no labels as a broad organization tends. It's not like the Contract With America where you have to sign on to 10 propositions or you're not really part of the Contract. People can pick and choose. My view is that there is no justification for filibustering a so called motion to proceed to debate. None whatsoever. I can't think of any theory of democracy where preventing serious discussion of an issue is the right thing to do. I suppose we could have an interesting debate about the Wilmot Proviso if you want to go back. There is silence sometimes golden. I suppose so. But as a general proposition, that's not the right way to run a democracy. And who knows if senators are actually debating an issue in full view of the American people, not only might the people learn something, but some of them might change their minds. It might accelerate the process of informed information, rather informed opinion formation. So I am emphatically in favor of that reform. I will tell you why I'm hesitant to go all the way down the road. And interestingly, a lot of Democrats are now beginning to think seriously about this. The filibuster is a shield as well as a sword. And many Democrats are now asking themselves, should we advocate the total abolition of the filibuster when Mitch McConnell, who may very well be the Senate Majority Leader, has not ruled out, conspicuously refused to rule out bringing a national abortion ban to the floor of the Senate in 2023 if he has the power to do so. Do Democrats really want to open the door to that? I'm not saying that the answer is obviously no, but it is a serious question, which is more than a law school hypothetical. I mean, no disrespect to law school hypotheticals, but this is a real issue, real and present. That's where I am as of now. Having said that, this is one of those issues where I have shifted my position over time and cannot guarantee to you or your listeners that I'll be in this same spot for the rest of my life.

Right. But I think that what's striking about the issue is the way it relates to the theory of change of no labels. Because let's just take the proposed reform that you were describing, which I would totally sign onto, like, let's make it so at least you can get something to the floor to debate it. I would go further, but let's take it at least there. The current rule basically means that the 41st most conservative or the 41st most liberal has a veto over the ability of Congress to address anything. Because what that extreme on the right or extreme on the left person can do is trigger a filibuster that stops the ability to consider anything, meaning that the extreme. So Mike Lee is the 41st most Conservative member of the Senate. Mike Lee gets to decide what the Senate can proceed on or not. But the theory of no labels was that we were going to get a bunch of people who were reasonable and willing to talk to the other side to sit down and work together to try to solve problems. Those people are counted out in any regime where the 41st most liberal or the 41st most conservative gets to decide what Congress can address. And so when you think about what no Label says it's trying to do. It seems inconsistent then, not to support openly the idea of getting us to a place where the reasonable majority actually can govern, whether it's eliminating it completely or at least getting to a place where we can have a debate about it. That seems much more fundamental to what no Labels would be about. Which leads, I think, many people to. To be cynical or skeptical about really, what is no Labels about. Because to the extent I know you're familiar with the inappropriately leaked, perhaps, but leaked conversation from last June where Andrew Bersky was with Joe Manchin talking about the efforts of no Labels around the filibuster and Manchin was talking about his need to block the effort to change the filibuster. That seemed inconsistent with the idea of no Labels trying to facilitate a Congress that could address problems in a reasonable, moderate way.

Well, I'm going to surprise you, Larry. I was not aware of that.

Wow. Okay.

I would be very surprised to learn that Joe Manchin is unbudgibly against changing the rule on the motion to proceed. Let me tell you, I say that because I have had private conversations with senior Republican senators who are in favor of that reform. I think there may have been some, and I have not heard this recording, I blush to admit, but I think there may have been some confusion as between the total abolition of the filibuster and the abolition of the filibuster on the motion to proceed to discussion and debate. But I'm not sure about that since I simply haven't heard it.

Well, that's very revealing and it reassures me about you, Bill, because it's a striking conversation. It's not just about the filibuster. It's also about the role of money. Because what Andrew Bersky was describing in the course of this conversation was the extraordinary leverage no Labels had because of the insane amount of time that Congressmen have to spend raising money. I mean, let me just read you one passage of what he said. He said, think about joining the House. You're there for 730 days. Unless you pick the leap year, you might get 731. And for vast majority of those days, you were spending four hours on the telephone dialing for dollars. And then he goes on, and so what a large contribution from donors, namely the no labels donors, does, aside from sending a very strong message that there are those, if you take tough votes, that bipartisan nature might not be popular within your party. It also in real life, frees them to do more work because it's spending less time raising those funds. Now, I would agree with that. I mean, indeed, most of my work is just trying to get people to focus on the dependency that fundraising creates for those members. But what's striking about that is that he's selling this dependency as a way to demonstrate the power of no labels to force its issues into Congress and to get them resolved in that particular way. And again, you can take the position as you did originally, which is like, I'm a realist, we're not going to change money in politics. But that's very different from saying I'm an opportunist and I'm going to leverage the, the power of money in politics and the fact that we've got large donors who are giving, you know, he says, the no Labels Team 1000, which would be people who could give up to $50,000 to support a particular candidate. It's another thing to take advantage of the system in a way that makes people skeptical about whether the real objective is improving the system or leveraging the bad in the system for particular ends that your funders might support.

Well, I can understand that. I would say first of all that there is a difference between using leverage, including money, to force people to do things that they don't believe in, as opposed to using leverage to empower people to do things that they believe in. We're not talking about quid pro quo here, of course. What we're talking about is a system which I deplore. Let's be clear, we do not have a normative difference here, Larry. A system that I deplore which now forces people to start dialing in the House of Representatives, start dialing for dollars even before they assume office, and to do it essentially every day or to fall behind and then have to spend miserable 18 hour days doing it in order to have enough of a war chest to scare off potential primary opponents just for starts and then to wage a general election campaign. This is a terrible system, but it is the system. I would be thrilled if reformers could find a way of changing this system. I've watched with dismay at the fate of their efforts. But what are people supposed to do in the midterm time? They're supposed to throw up their hands or if you have leverage within the current system that empowers people who genuinely want to work with members of the other side towards ends that they jointly agree to empower them to do that and to tell them, and to tell them that if they get primaried as a result of that, that people will have their backs in, frankly, the way that matters most in a primary campaign. Now, do I like this? This is an X best system of government where X is not a small number. But General Marshall famously said when people were wringing their hands, he said, don't fight the problem, fix the problem. And if the problem is not being able to get things done in a terrible system, then figuring out how to get things done in that terrible system is a whole lot better than just sitting back and waiting for a lightning bolt of illumination to hit the Supreme Court, the leadership of the House and Senate, and the American people. I don't think we have time to allow that to happen. I am 100% against using money just to bring this around full circle to get people to take and work for positions that they don't believe in and that designed to serve special interests. I can't say that I'm in favor of using money in the current, current system to empower people to do what their conscience tells them to do, but which political and financial calculations may counsel against.

Right. And I agree with that. Although there's a third case here which we should make sure is on the table. When money has been deployed to produce a Congress filled with people who are at the extremes, they don't have to be doing stuff they don't want to do. They just start doing stuff that wouldn't necessarily be the stuff of Congress if that money hadn't filled the Congress with people who believe at the extremes. So the money is a part of the problem. And I accept the idea, you could have the idea of a reform organization that thought this is not the part of the problem we're going to solve. But it feels like there's a normative obligation at least to be clear about the three steps that would get us to a better functioning representative democracy and the filibuster, at least to a place where we could have a debate about issues like the talking filibuster, where you've got to work for it. You can't just stop legislation by sending a text to your leader. We be an extraordinarily important point. And yes, it might make more risky certain issues that we care about. But, you know, the idea that we set American policy on the basis of whether abortion is going to be passed at the federal level or not is a little crazy. Right. There are really important issues out there as well as this important issue. And what we have right now is a system that doesn't enable us to address really any of them, except in these rare cases that you have helped facilitate, like the infrastructure bill. But what beyond this are we going to get? So long as 41 senators have the ability to block any consideration of any bill more powerful than the veto? Because of course, a veto can be overridden, but you can't override the refusal of the Senate to pass or consider a bill.

Well, that is true, although a fortiori, if you. If you can't get 60 votes, you can't get 67.

Yeah, right. Which is why I think there's a Manchin, when they had the discussion, when they had the debate on the floor of the Senate about the filibuster, which is an extraordinary day, because I think it's a measure of really the weakening of the Senate. If you compare it to the debate about McCain, Franklin Feingold, which was a genuine intellectual debate between people who had very different sides. This was a show. People got up and they read their speeches and there was very little real exchange about it. But the most striking thing to me was Senator Manchin stands on the floor of the Senate and standing next to him is a sign. And the sign says, never in the history of the United States Senate has a majority had the power to. To basically stop debate and bring a bill to a vote. That's not exactly what it says, but that was exactly what its meaning was. Now, that was an astonishing placard to put next to him because of course, as I'm sure you know, in the first 50 years of the United States Senate, a simple majority vote could always bring a bill to a vote. For the first 50 years of the Senate, there was a perfect capacity for the majority to rule. For most of the history of the Senate, there was a norm that allowed a bill to ultimately be voted on in a majority way, because the norm of the Senate was we ought to be able to get things done. But the problem you started describing, the negative partisanship that has infected our Congress has produced a new norm in Congress, Congress, which is we don't want anything to be done by Congress. Except of course, as you know, the Senate filibuster rule exempts certain issues that are like budget issues, which makes it possible to cut taxes with a simple majority or appoint Supreme Court justices with a simple majority. But any other issue requires a super majority. But in a world where there's no norm to work together, that's basically saying we've decided Congress won't be doing anything. It seems to me this is a really fundamental problem for an organization that's focused on trying to find a way to get agreement on sensible issues, it would feel like being transparent about the nature of that problem. And these issues would be central to your mission?

Well, I'm describing and representing no labels as it is. It is a distinctive organization with a distinctive set of objectives. And we've been clear from the start that there are all sorts of worthy reforms, like, for example, the reform of the system that produces legislative districts,

or

reform of money in politics and a bunch of other issues which many other organizations are working on. And we took the position from the start that to be effective, you had to have a narrow range of objectives on which you concentrated all of your forces. There's a famous story. Napoleon has just taken over France. And of course, all the other powers of Europe are massing to attack France. France. Napoleon asks his generals for their best defensive plans. And one general produced an array of the French army with battalions equidistant and symmetrical around the entire French border. And Napoleon took a look at that and he smiled and said, general, are you trying to stop smuggling? And that remark, I think, illustrates why in politics, as in war, a concentration of forces on key objectives, rather than trying, as Putin did at the beginning of the Ukraine war, to attack simultaneously from every direction, thin out your forces, accomplish nothing, embarrass yourselves, and have to go back and start all over again. I defend the right of any reform organization to focus on the problems that it thinks it can make a difference in solving, particularly if it believes that no other organizations are trying to solve that problem. But as I said, there's one other thing to say in response, and I say this with no choice here whatsoever. In circumstances of deep partisan polarization,

the

consequences of allowing the other party to get its unfettered way are much more serious than they would be in a less polarized situation. There was a time in American history when I was a boy and a young man where allowing the Democrats to write a bill or allowing the Republicans to write the bill on the same subject wouldn't have produced a disaster either way. But now the downside of allowing the other party to have its way is much greater. I think it is unreasonable to expect either party to allow that to happen. And if one party does allow it to happen, the odds are that it will come to regret that permission slip to the other party as soon as they lose control of the House or the Senate or both. So there is a relationship between polarization and various counter majoritarian restrictions on the voting process in the House and the Senate. I think you'll have to change one in order to change the other.

It's a great point. It's a really great point. Bill, I promised you 255 you could stop, and we're 2:54. So I'm going to deliver on that promise. And I'm grateful for your honest and really, really insightful contribution in this conversation. Thank you.

Well, thanks for inviting me, Larry. It's been a pleasure.

That was Bill Galston reflecting on where we are and how, I guess we could say how we're stuck. And that is where we are. That's why it does seem we are stuck. And the anxiety about this polarized Congress in a majoritarian system I think will create fear for people on both sides. I think Galston's point about the abortion debate in particular brings that out. Because if in fact, the objectives of people like me to see the filibuster changed fundamentally to return us to a majoritarian Congress came about, we could easily see the flip and back and forth inside of Congress based on these extremely polarized parties that have little to do, as Gallston was suggesting, with the actual mix of people, people in America. It is an incredibly difficult cult problem. So we'll continue the conversation. This is Larry Lessig. This is an episode of Another Way podcast produced by Equal Citizens. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us Another Way, and you can find a place there to give us your feedback and your ideas and your suggestions and the directions you think we should go. The feedback is extremely interesting, not always pleasant, but at least interesting for me, and I'm grateful for that feedback and especially grateful for the support of the work that we're trying to do. More on that later. Thank you for tuning in. Stay tuned for the next episode, which I promise, promise will not be five months from now.