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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
  • 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
  • Heather McGhee on Zero-Sum Politics, the Party System, and Finding Hope in History

    Heather McGhee on Zero-Sum Politics, the Party System, and Finding Hope in History
    2026/05/29
    Heather McGhee is featured on the latest episode of our This Old Democracy podcast. Heather is the former president of Demos, author of the bestselling The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, and one of the most incisive voices in American political life and thought. In the conversation with host Micah Sifry, McGhee connects the dots between the racial politics she chronicled in The Sum of Us and the authoritarian moment we're living through right now — and she doesn't let the two-party system off the hook. McGhee's central argument in her writing and organizing is that the "zero-sum mindset" — the belief that gains for people of color come only at the expense of white Americans — has been systematically deployed by elites to destroy support for shared public goods. She famously illustrated this with the story of Southern communities that literally drained and then shut down their public swimming pools rather than allow Black children to swim alongside white children. On the podcast, she updates that analysis for our era. For me it remains a useful and powerful framework for understanding what's going on in front of our dismayed eyes. "I wish that the book didn't have so much to say in this moment. I wish that it was an antiquated time capsule. If only... Elon Musk comes in, the richest man in the world and gleefully tries to destroy everything we hold in common from cancer research to national parks to life-saving AIDS treatment. We really are living in a world where the zero-sum story is the core right-wing narrative in the United States and in many other places." The conversation turns to why Trump's second term feels qualitatively different from his first. McGhee's diagnosis is clear: the corporate world has bent the knee, Silicon Valley has bankrolled the regime, and the authoritarian playbook — going after lawyers, universities, and media — is running on all cylinders. But she pushes back on the narrative that the country itself has swung sharply rightward. "I think it's really important that we not over-attribute an electoral snapshot to the heart and soul of this country… People are disgusted by the immigration crackdown… Donald Trump's numbers are in the tank across everything, from the economy to immigration. And people are actually more hungry for big solidarity solutions — like addressing health care costs in a way that is permanent, universal, and guaranteed. These policies that are like refilling the pool of public goods, they're a sort of update of the New Deal era, are far more popular than any political party." From there, the conversation moves to terrain that is very much The Ticket's home turf: whether the two-party system itself is one of the root causes of our crisis. McGhee doesn't hedge. "Between money-in-politics and the two-party system, we simply don't have enough choices, and there is such a radical class bias to our electoral options that you have a working class and increasingly a middle class that just does not have enough champions in politics. As long as that is the case — late-stage capitalism, record inequality, and we don't have a politics that is not responsive to it — we are going to continue to have volatility. We're going to continue to have faux populists, outsiders, authoritarians saying, 'I can fix this, I will blow up this system for you.' And then they come in and line their pockets." She's unambiguous about the remedy: fusion voting and multi-party democracy. And she grounds her case in history, pointing to the cross-racial Fusion coalitions of the post-Civil War South — in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia — as a model for what electoral pluralism can do for communities of color. "There is a long history in this country of fusion voting really being about creating cross-racial coalitions. And you see that in the era after the Civil War, when that is the only way you had white working class and Black power to help create Southern democracy, in that narrow window before the Supreme Court and the northern elites gave up on it." With the Supreme Court now amputating the last leg of the Voting Rights Act — wiping out majority-minority districts that have enabled the election of representatives from communities historically excluded from power — McGhee sees multi-partyism as a democratic lifeline. "[W]e need to massively disrupt our electoral system and give more people more choices. We do need to encourage politicians to seek coalitions. We do need to encourage movements to seek coalitions in order to get things done for the American people and solve our big problems and make sure we have nice things. "I do think that there is a way in which that does help create racial solidarity at the ballot box. And it's a very exciting dimension of the growing push for multiparty voting, for fusion, for more electoral diversity." The episode closes on a remarkable note. Asked how she ...
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    44 分
  • Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next

    Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next
    2026/05/05
    In a wide-ranging conversation with Micah Sifry, longtime political columnist Kuttner takes stock of what went wrong, why the guardrails may be holding, and what it will actually take to rebuild democracy from what he sees as the wreckage of the neoliberal era. There's a particular kind of intellectual honesty in someone who has spent decades arguing for a position, been vindicated by history, and still asks himself: So why did we lose? That's the animating question of Bob Kuttner's new book, Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America, and it's the question that drives the latest episode of This Old Democracy. Kuttner — co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, professor at Brandeis University, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and author of 14 books — brings to this conversation the perspective of someone who has watched American politics from the inside and the outside for more than half a century. Host Micah Sifry gives him room to roam, and Kuttner takes full advantage. The through-line of Kuttner's memoir is captured in the title of one of its chapters: "Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics." As he tells Micah, he has long believed that the Democratic Party's embrace of neoliberal, market-first economics in the 1980s and 1990s was not just wrong on the merits — it was a political catastrophe. "The turn to neoliberalism basically set the stage for Trump because it meant that the Democrats gave up on the white working class, which made interracial coalition much more arduous. And the claims of neoliberalism that this would energize the economy turned out to be completely bogus. The only thing neoliberalism did was it made the rich richer and the middle class [and] the working class more vulnerable." When he and Paul Starr and Robert Reich launched The American Prospect in 1990, they were swimming hard against the tide. The conventional wisdom, personified by the rise of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, was that the Democratic Party was too pro-union, too pro-Black, just too liberal. The Prospect said: no, liberals need to become better New Dealers. Two years later, Bill Clinton was in the White House, quoting them — and then, largely ignoring them Kuttner knew better, in part because of his experience in midwifing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Kuttner was chief investigator for Senator William Proxmire's Banking Committee in the mid-1970s, and the story of how the CRA came to be is, well, thrilling (in a nerdy way). This profoundly useful piece of legislation did nothing more than consider poor people as legitimate actors in our society, deserving of respect when they too sought to obtain a mortgage and purchase a home. Kuttner describes how the CRA emerged: grassroots multiracial neighborhood coalitions, a sympathetic US Senator who did not accept any campaign contributions, investigative staff tasked with developing tough hearings, and a press that covered them seriously. The result was landmark legislation that created immensely powerful tools against redlining if the citizenry used them (which they did). Kuttner calls it his graduate education in how the financial system — and the political system — actually function. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the conversation, for listeners expecting gloom, is Kuttner's relatively buoyant short-term read on where things stand. "I think contrary to what a lot of people felt six months ago, I think the guardrails are holding more than we dared hope. Trump is just really on the skids. Republicans are giving themselves permission to criticize him. Democrats are feeling bolder and more feisty. He's lost the courts — which is just amazing." He notes that the recent defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — by a candidate who broke from the authoritarian's own party and organized a movement from scratch — is a meaningful data point: even entrenched authoritarians can lose when they lose the people. Unsurprisingly, he thinks it likely that control of Congress and then the presidency is likely to flip back once again to the opposition party. But then he pauses. Full stop. Because that's when he gets worried. Short-term optimism gives way to a much harder question. Kuttner frames it plainly: "I think democracy will survive. The question is whether it will deliver." For Kuttner, the social contract that his generation inherited — affordable college, decent wages for blue-collar workers, employer-provided pensions and health insurance, attainable home ownership — has been systematically dismantled. Restoring something like it will require a political agenda every bit as ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's. If Democrats return to power without that kind of courage and that kind of mandate, he warns, they will only incubate the next wave of authoritarian populism. The anxieties and resentments that produced Trump don't go away just because Trump loses. This is ...
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    42 分
  • Voters are not Thinking like bankers. We're thinking like sports fans.

    Voters are not Thinking like bankers. We're thinking like sports fans.
    2026/03/30
    Political scientist Lilliana Mason on social sorting, partisan self-deception, and why the two-party system makes all of it worse. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features the remarkable Lilliana Mason, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, in a wide-ranging conversation with host Micah Sifry. Mason offers a rigorous — and at times unsettling — account of why Americans have stopped thinking of their political opponents as fellow citizens. She discusses parties, politics, policy, and young people. We really need to think about this one because the civil in civil society is an essential piece of the democratic puzzle. In Mason's view, political parties are essential to democratic decisionmaking. "[Parties] are a really useful informational shortcut for us. We can't ask our citizens to read every single piece of legislation and every piece of the party platform and know about all of the different parts of the platform and fully understand these policies. The reason we have representative democracy is because we don't all have time to do that and we can't expect everyone to do that. And so what parties do is they simplify that political decision that we are given the privilege of making as citizens. We can't all be experts. And so the parties give us a much simpler choice." Mason's work centers on a deceptively simple insight: we don't really choose our political parties the way we choose between competing products on a shelf. The "banker mind" model of democratic citizenship — the idea that voters coolly weigh policy options, calculate trade-offs, and select the candidate who best serves their interests — is, she argues, largely a myth. The reality is considerably messier. "Our punditry tends to assume that we think about politics sort of like bankers and we're choosing investments with a sober and quantitative mind and assessing the positives and negatives, you know, is this policy marginally affecting my family in this number of decimal points? But actually, that's not how we participate in politics. We're much more like sports fans when we engage in politics." What has happened over the past six decades, Mason explains, is a process she calls social sorting: the gradual alignment of partisan identity with race, religion, geography, and other social identities. In the 1950s, both parties contained meaningful internal diversity — cross-cutting coalitions that made it impossible to know, just from someone's party registration, very much about who they were. That era is over. Today, the parties have sorted themselves into two fairly coherent tribes, and the sorting makes genuine cross-partisan contact rarer with every passing election cycle. What makes social sorting especially durable, Mason says, is that people genuinely believe they are reasoning independently — even when they're not. She describes a political science experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned either a Democratic or Republican label to the same welfare policy. Democrats reliably preferred the "Democratic" policy, and Republicans the "Republican" one, even when the substantive details of the policies had been swapped. When asked afterward whether their party had influenced their preference: "Everyone said, not at all. That was entirely me. I have entirely come up with the reasons for my desire to have this policy enacted. We don't know that we're doing it. And also in that experiment, they said, do you think other people are influenced by their party? And everybody says, yes, definitely. Everyone else is influenced by their party, but I'm not." The distortions don't stop at policy preferences. Mason's research also documents systematic misperceptions of who actually belongs to each party. Americans consistently overestimate the share of Democrats who are Black, LGBTQ+, or non-Christian — and overestimate the share of Republicans who are elderly or evangelical. "Most people assume that Democrats are 35% LGBT and the true number is 5%. They assume that Democrats are 40% Black and the true number is 25%." These stereotypes aren't merely factual errors. They shape the emotional valence of partisan identity: if you believe the other party is almost entirely composed of groups you view negatively, your hostility toward that party will track your feelings about those groups — whether or not the factual premise is accurate. The stakes of all this, Mason makes clear, are not merely rhetorical. In her book, Radical American Partisanship, she and Nathan Kalmoe measure the kinds of attitudes that social scientists have found to precede mass violence in other contexts — dehumanization, vilification, openness to political aggression. The numbers they've compiled since 2017 are worth sitting with: "In 2017, it was about 40% of Democrats and Republicans who were willing to say the other party was evil. It's gone up to almost 70% of Republicans in 2022. Last summer, it's around 50 to 60% of ...
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