『This Old Democracy』のカバーアート

This Old Democracy

This Old Democracy

著者： Micah Sifry
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Hosted by Micah Sifry, This Old Democracy explores the ideas, movements and people working to rescue our faltering political system -- and rebuild American democracy on a stronger, more inclusive and truly representative foundation. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Center for Ballot Freedom, a cross-partisan nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy.2025 政治・政府 政治学
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  • How the GOP expands its ranks, while the Democratic Party hates its base, and why it matters?

    How the GOP expands its ranks, while the Democratic Party hates its base, and why it matters?
    2026/08/18
    On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Tom Asher, the director of research and global engagement at Columbia World Projects. Asher is leading a university-wide working group that seeks to turn academic insights into pathways for action on challenging civic and social problems. For the past two years, Tom and his colleagues at Columbia World Projects have been working in partnership with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, focusing on a simple but hard question: How do we fix our democratic system? That made Tom a perfect guest for Micah to talk with. The show started with some level-setting. Micah asked Asher, "Is democracy in America in trouble? is this something new or is it something we've been through before?" Tom's response: "Yes, yes and yes." Asher explained that America has faced democratic threats before – citing Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. But these voices were checked by institutions; Coughlin was ultimately subdued by his own church's hierarchy as well as the radio broadcasters trade association; McCarthyism was ultimately restrained by the U.S. Senate and the free press. Today, the kinds of institutions capable of providing checks on authoritarian movements have lost courage, standing and power. Asher connects the reduced power of civil society institutions to the decline in membership organizations that inculcated democratic values and skills. "If you think about unions, for example, at mid-century, one American worker in three belonged to a union. Today it's one in ten… But it's not only that. It's that if you read their literature from, say, the mid-19th century past the mid-20th century, they not only worked to build their membership and to fight for higher wages, but they actually expressed the goal of cultivating the democratic capacities of their members and the ideal of defending democracy itself. And that's not the case today. The great federated associations, the Elks, the Women's Clubs, the American Legion, which gathered people and taught them real democratic skills, oriented them toward active civic life, have lost most of their membership after the 1970s, and they've never recovered." The hollowing out of civil society – and of political parties – has been a running theme on This Old Democracy. We've covered the research and perspectives of Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Daniel Schlozman, Didi Kuo and others – all making the case that richer parties make for a more resilient democracy. Asher argues that the hollowing out has been more substantial on the left than on the right. "As the union hall, the mainline congregation, the lodge, the local party offices were hollowing out, the need for belonging didn't disappear with them. When the old rooms closed, people were looking for new ones, and the right built those rooms and waited and invited people in. And what they built were mega churches organized around small group discussions, Turning Point chapters, Moms for Liberty gatherings, and these were often weekly, in-person, meeting people where they already were." Asher explains why this matters, and the distinction between the left and the right. These kinds of groups say, "[J]oin us, sit with us, have fun at our rollicking events, regardless of what you believe. Belonging, as Hahrie Han, the great political scientist, puts it, comes before belief. The politics arrive later, carried by the relationships. And the left offers something very different. Believe in our cause and send $25. Citizens are treated more as its targets, not participants." Micah challenges Asher, pointing to social projects on the left like Black Lives Matter, the Women's March and the No Kings marches. Asher says these are different. "Compare the two parties and how they received their insurgents. The Tea Party was absorbed by the Republican Party, it got remade in its own image, and it remade the Tea Party as well. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, borrows the movements' language, it spends their energies at election time. But it tends to resist the demands the rest of the year. And someone in our convening put it really provocatively… [T]he Republican Party, this person said, loves its base. The Democratic Party appears to hate or at least fear its own." Asher believes we need parties that are thick in two directions. He explains: "They need to be socially thick. That means present year-round, useful to people between elections, and embedded to a greater degree than they are in people's routine lives. But they also need to be politically thick with real internal debate, factions, and decision maps that members can win or lose, and live with that losing. That's really important in a democracy, and we seem to be losing that skill." "And then second, we need to wrestle to a greater degree than we have with whether to invite groups that stand adjacent to the parties closer to the inside. So organizations ...
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    30 分
  • Sam Bagenstos on litigating our way to a multi-party system in Michigan

    Sam Bagenstos on litigating our way to a multi-party system in Michigan
    2026/07/21
    A noted civil rights lawyer and law professor makes the constitutional case for reviving fusion voting (and fusion parties) — and explains why he thinks the timing is right. On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Samuel Bagenstos, the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and a professor of public policy at the Ford School. The principal topic: a lawsuit he's helped bring to get us out of the two-party "doom loop." Bagenstos has spent his career moving between scholarship, litigation, and government service. He served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Obama Justice Department, then as general counsel first at the Office of Management and Budget and later at the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden. Now he's back in court. He's representing the Michigan Common Sense Party and the Michigan Libertarian Party in a suit filed in May challenging the state's 131-year-old ban on fusion voting. Context is everything, in life and litigation both, and Bagenstos sets the stage well. In post-Civil War Michigan the GOP was generally dominant, but a coalition of Democrats, Populists, Greenbackers and laborites used fusion to break the GOP's grip on state government in the 1880s and 90s. This coalition didn't just win elections for the sake of holding office — they had an agenda and used their time in power to push through labor reforms, consumer protections, and women's suffrage (along with, he adds dryly, Prohibition–yes, we made that pun up on our own). Nobody rules forever, and the Republicans clawed their way back to power. By 1895, the GOP was in complete control of state government. They understood that their opponents were a varied lot – by occupation, religion, region, race, ethnicity – and they also understood that fusion was the very rule that allowed different political factions to unite across those differences. The GOP decided to prevent such coalitions from forming rather than have to defeat them once formed. Fusion voting was made illegal, and fusion parties vanished. Change the rules, change the outcome. For more than 130 years, the fusion ban stood unchallenged. But Bagenstos argues the ban on that kind of coalition-building is newly and perhaps even deeply vulnerable because of how Michigan voters have amended their own state constitution in recent years. A new context has emerged. In 2018, voters approved creating an independent redistricting commission and added voting protections. In 2022, the same coalition went further, adding a sweeping guarantee of "the fundamental right to vote" that bars anything that denies, abridges, or unreasonably burdens that right. Layer on top of that a "Purity of Elections" clause in the state constitution that the Michigan Supreme Court has long read as barring the legislature from favoring major parties over minor ones. Bagenstos thinks fusion's opponents are running out of room. Ask Bagenstos why this matters beyond party-building, and he discusses the voter's dilemma. [W]ithout fusion voting in a first-past-the-post system, what we have for the voter is effectively three really bad choices, right? The voter who doesn't see themselves represented in either political party either swallows their lack of representation and votes for the political party that's closest to them that doesn't really represent them, or the voter votes for a third party, which is at best ineffective in our first-past-the-post system, and at worst likely to lead to actually the worst outcome from the voter's perspective because it will be a spoiler for the major party candidate who is closest to the voter; or the voter just says, look, I'm not represented here, I don't have good choices, I'm not gonna vote. That framing is part of why Bagenstos's client list is such a cross-cutting assortment: the Common Sense Party (mostly ex-Republicans repelled by Trumpism), the Libertarian Party, a Democratic candidate who'd also like a second ballot line, and individual voters from across the spectrum. As he puts it, "I think that we see... this is not about a particular ideology. This is about opening up our democracy." The fusion ban's defenders will likely lean on the old argument that banning electoral coalitions between major and minor parties protects political stability — the same reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court used in 1997's Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party to bless Minnesota's fusion ban. Bagenstos doesn't think that argument has aged well: I don't know how these justices — who are very smart people — or really anyone else looking around could look at the world we're living in and say the two-party system has really worked well to stabilize our democracy. The evidence that it's not is just all around us. He points to an expert report from political scientist Lee Drutman that has been submitted as part of the plaintiff's case. Drutman argues that the Rehnquist Court ...
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    33 分
  • Jennifer McCoy on Pernicious Polarization, Hungary's Lessons, and the Case for PR

    Jennifer McCoy on Pernicious Polarization, Hungary's Lessons, and the Case for PR
    2026/07/02
    The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Jennifer McCoy, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and political science professor at Georgia State University. McCoy is one of the world's leading researchers on democratic erosion and recovery, and on political polarization — a topic she has spent years studying comparatively across dozens of countries. The conversation with host Micah Sifry covers a lot of ground: what's really wrong with American democracy right now, what happened in Hungary, and whether structural reforms like proportional representation and fusion voting could help dig us out. McCoy wastes no time getting to the diagnosis. "I think we're in trouble," she tells Sifry early on. "We have extreme political polarization that I call pernicious polarization because it has a harm to democracy... And we have democratic backsliding going on. And basically we have a frayed society, a frayed social fabric that makes it difficult." "Pernicious" is the key word. McCoy draws a distinction between ordinary political polarization — which simply presents voters with choices, and can be healthy — and the pernicious variety, which "gets so extreme and uses negative tactics and negative rhetoric that demonizes and belittles the opposition" to the point where compromise becomes impossible and the other side starts to feel like an existential threat. That dynamic, she argues, is exactly what we're living through, and declining presidential poll numbers alone aren't enough to break it. Her proposed remedy is counterintuitive, at least to ears trained on the bridge-building discourse: rather than trying to reduce polarization directly, she argues we need to repolarize — but along a different axis. Instead of the red-vs.-blue, Democrat-vs.-Republican divide that currently structures our politics, she wants to see a new organizing line drawn between top and bottom, or between the interests of ordinary people and a corrupt elite. As she puts it: "We have one axis of polarization now, and it's basically defined as red, blue, Democrat, Republican... So what we're saying is you take that axis and you shift it around, like moving around a clock, move that line around and create a new axis, but one where you're not dividing into two equal parts, where you can actually galvanize a large group, a large majority, around an idea." It sounds theoretical, but McCoy has a concrete recent example: Hungary. This past spring, Viktor Orbán — who spent 16 years transforming Hungary from a democracy into what McCoy calls an "illiberal autocracy," and who has served as a model for authoritarian leaders elsewhere — lost power in a stunning electoral defeat. The victor, Peter Magyar, was actually a defector from Orbán's own party, and he succeeded largely by doing exactly what McCoy's framework prescribes: presenting a new axis of conflict, pitting the nation against Orbán's "clan" of cronies and corrupt elites. Magyar campaigned everywhere, including rural areas that had long been Orbán strongholds. And because he came from the inside, he was able to preempt the government's attempts to pin corruption charges on him by simply acknowledging his own past and denouncing the system. The Hungary comparison leads naturally to a conversation about structural reform. Sifry raises fusion voting and proportional representation as tools for escaping the two-party doom loop. McCoy is an advocate for both. On proportional representation, she makes the case with precision: it reduces pernicious polarization because it opens up political space beyond the binary. When people only have two options, she notes, they tend to vote against the scarier one — negative partisanship — rather than for something they actually believe in. Proportional systems allow parties to earn seats in proportion to the votes they actually receive, and multi-member districts could, in a state like Georgia, produce a congressional delegation that includes a MAGA Republican, a traditional Republican, a centrist Democrat, a progressive Democrat, and perhaps a Libertarian or Working Families representative. That's not fragmentation; that's a politics that more accurately reflects what voters actually want. And on fusion voting, McCoy is equally warm. She notes what Ticket readers already know: fusion doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Neither does proportional representation for the House — just a change to a single law passed in 1967. "[N]either of these require a constitutional amendment," she says. "They can be done just with changing legislation." The episode closes on the question Sifry puts to every guest: how do you cope? McCoy turns to Buddhist philosophy — "impermanence makes possible transformation" — and to the people around her: colleagues who believe in human agency, students, and younger generations who want something different and are ready to take risks to get it. It's a grounded...
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    35 分
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