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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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  • 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
  • What Would It Mean for a Party to Actually Represent You?

    What Would It Mean for a Party to Actually Represent You?
    2026/06/22
    The latest This Old Democracy features Tabatha Abu El-Haj on associational party building, the power of a ballot line, and what democratic accountability can look like in practice. Something is missing from American politics — and it's not a policy position or a charismatic leader. It's a structural connection between the people who hold office and the communities they claim to represent. Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a professor of law at Drexel University and a nationally recognized scholar of the First Amendment and the law of democracy, has a name for what's missing. She calls it associational party building, and it's the subject of both a paper recently released by New America under the title A Model for Associational Party Building and a rich conversation with host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy. The argument is deceptively simple: parties work best not as top-down electoral machines, but as living, rooted civic associations — embedded in the communities they represent, rich in face-to-face relationships, and accountable in ways that money alone can never manufacture. Abu El-Haj came to this view through an indirect route. She had spent years studying money in politics, but arrived at a sobering conclusion: you can't take money out of politics. So where does that leave ordinary people? "What they have is numbers on election day, but to exercise that power requires effective organization." She describes the problem with both major parties in terms that will feel familiar to most readers. The two major parties, she says — especially at the national level — "feel very disconnected from what the rest of us experience life as." They operate, in her telling, at a remove from ordinary people, inside echo chambers driven not just by moneyed elites but by professional ones too. An associational party is a remedy for that disconnection — one that starts bottom-up, invests in genuine community relationships, and gives ordinary members real encounters with the candidates and elected officials who depend on them. Here is where the theory connects most directly to election reform. What gives an associational party its distinctive power — beyond what any civic coalition can achieve on its own — is the ability to make its contribution to a candidate's victory visible and auditable. Without a separate line on the ballot, there's no way to prove, conclusively, how many votes came from your people. And without that proof, elected officials can always find a reason to take the meeting but ignore the ask. As we've written here frequently, fusion voting allows minor parties to show that proof without asking voters to waste a vote or spoil an election. Abu El-Haj's research draws on extensive interviews with organizers who built a new fusion party and experienced the shift from interest group to political party firsthand. The civic group leaders recounted how their relationships with legislators were transformed: "Before we were a part of the party, we would get access, but it would be like begging…. And then, you know, we would tell them, yeah, we delivered, but they were like, 'Yeah, we probably could have gotten those votes anyways. We could have hired other people to, it was just a matter of money.'" Once a party can point to a specific number of votes cast on its line in a specific district, that argument collapses. The contribution is no longer deniable. And from that shift — from invisible to auditable — real accountability becomes possible. The ballot line, she notes, also acts as organizational glue: in any coalition, tensions arise, but members who have tasted that kind of power don't easily walk away. Abu El-Haj is careful to note that her primary case study — the Working Families Party's experience in New York — was founded by unions and community organizing groups with deep roots in relational politics, and that not every new party effort starts from that foundation. But the core insight, she argues, applies broadly: to centrist parties trying to build a home for voters alienated from both major parties, to reform movements working to restore fusion voting, and as a cautionary lesson about what happens when parties don't do this work. She points to MAGA's rise as a case in point: it was able to emerge, she argues, in part because the old Republican elite "was not very well embedded" — and the same is true of the Democrats. "In the Bush-Clinton era," as she puts it, both parties were "disengaged." Churches, PTAs, civic associations, local unions — these are potential anchors for any party willing to do the slow, relational work. The model doesn't require a particular ideology. It requires a particular kind of commitment. "I hope that the leaders of those parties, when they get their ballot line in, will think about comparable ways to embed themselves." Go listen. It's one of the more useful conversations we've hosted about what democratic power actually...
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    34 分
  • Michael Latner on voting rights, proportional representation, and the ruins of the VRA

    Michael Latner on voting rights, proportional representation, and the ruins of the VRA
    2026/06/05
    The Callais decision is a watershed moment. Latner argues the only path forward runs through "party-system" reforms: PR w/ a side of Fusion. The Supreme Court didn't just rewrite the rules of redistricting in Louisiana v. Callais. It effectively ended, after more than forty years, the regime of legal protection for minority voters that the Voting Rights Act had built. The decision stripped away the tools that voting rights lawyers have relied on since the 1980s to identify and remedy racial vote dilution, leaving what Justice Kagan called, in dissent, "a dead letter." The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of research on democratic reform at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Latner co-authored Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty, and a major article in the Yale Law Journal (co-authored with Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Carlos Algara) titled "Callais Confusion, Power Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation" — published shortly before the Court issued its ruling. Host Micah Sifry puts that article, and its central argument, to the test over the course of a wide-ranging, substantive conversation. Latner walks through the mechanics of the Callais decision with admirable clarity. It isn't just that the court made it harder to prove discrimination; it's that the majority essentially declared that the only permissible approach is "racial blindness" — that courts can no longer rely on racial data to identify whether district maps dilute minority voting power. The catch: in a country where 90 percent of Black voters in Louisiana vote for the Democratic Party, the idea that race and party affiliation can be cleanly separated is, in Latner's telling, "empirically not possible." States can now gerrymander with impunity as long as they claim they're doing it for partisan, not racial, reasons. The fallout has been fast. Louisiana suspended an ongoing primary to redraw its maps and remove one of its two majority-minority districts. Tennessee eliminated its Black congressional district. Alabama, Mississippi — and maybe others are moving. As Latner puts it, states are "acting on the decision even before the ink is dry." What does all of this tell us about American democracy more broadly? Latner doesn't soften the diagnosis: "We are the only major democracy in the world that seats only two parties in its legislature... many U.S. voters were understandably upset at the Democratic Party in 2024. It was a poorly performing party. There was a leadership crisis. These are things that in normal democracies you would see the governing party replaced with an alternative. The problem in the U.S. is that the only alternative was an authoritarian one." Most proportional systems, he notes, have contained or constrained their authoritarian movements — through coalition governments that collapse when one party overreaches, or through vote-share constraints that limit how much power any single faction can accumulate. The United States is one of the rare cases where a major party has been fully taken over by authoritarian forces and handed unilateral control of government. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of our electoral system. This brings Latner to the central argument of his Yale Law Journal article: that proportional representation (PR) is not merely desirable but, given where the courts have taken us, inevitable. "The short answer hearkens back to Winston Churchill — that the Americans will do the right thing after they've tried everything else." The logic runs as follows. If the Supreme Court demands racial blindness, and if the only system that can achieve fair representation without relying on racial data is one where the threshold for winning a seat is low enough that any coherent organized coalition gets seats proportional to its votes — then proportional representation isn't just a reform preference. It is the only legally defensible path to minority representation in a post-VRA world. "If the Supreme Court is serious and we are now in an era, a post-VRA era where … the use of racial data in order to protect voters of color is not going to be used in operation of protecting voting rights; and if in fact racial blindness, which is what the court refers to as an appropriate approach to protecting voting rights, if that's actually the only option, there's only one type of electoral system where you can truly be racially blind. That is, you don't take account of race when you're designing the rules and the system, and that's proportional representation." The contrast with the old VRA framework is sharp. Under the Voting Rights Act, the state had to carve out specific districts, count citizen voting-age population, use ...
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    39 分
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