Latest work. All after words programs are available as podcasts. Host its perfect to be with you. I know we talked at the university of california Washington Center several years ago but its nice to see you again and your book, breaking the twoparty doom loop weaves history, Political Science and concrete reforms together and they really for knitting way and in a way that really resonated with me and was a pleasure to read. Its an important book. To pull back a little bit and ask why do you want to write about Political Parties because i know the first book was focused on lobbying. And in th a universe of potentil reform, the electoral college, one of the biggest ones money and politics you chose to focus on th parties as a linchpin. Can you talk about what drew you to the parties and the process . Guest why did i write this book . Because i was worried about american democracy and i saw a hyper partisan ship as a serious problem in the country and wanted to think about if there was some way to solve the problem. Iif kind of flowed in an indiret way about the growth of corporate lobbying and in that book i concluded on one one reay they uselobbyist were so powerfn washington, d. C. Was because essentially they broke a lot of the walls because there wasnt a tremendous amount of expertise and now on capitol hill because they turned over at such a high a rate anrate and congress didnt in it. It makes total sense and one reason it didnt happen is becausbecause if it becomes a centralized and i also realized adding more staff wouldnt solve the problem of hyper partisanship in congress in a way in which nothing gets done because theres so much gridlock except for the moments when to muctwomuch gets it done and i re the problem of the democracy at this moment is the fact we have two distinct National Parties. American political history goes back more than two centuries and talk about how the framers in invision the factions and parties that they saw and why this is such a departure. Lets start with the framers because that is where this political history starts. Succumb to framers were engaging in this system of selfgovernance and they thought Political Parties were Dangerous Things as they read their history of ancient rome and greece and republic and they saw the civil war was a threat to the selfgovernment and basil the civil war happens when it got split into it and there were two parties involved in what would happeoften whatwould happe its power to press the Minority Party and so they thought that they were going to come up with a system of government that would make it very hard for the parties to form. They were going to have three branches of government on top of the federal and that made it hard for the party to form at least in a coherent way. Thats one of the reasons american parties have been weak and incoherent until recent times because of parties for state and local. In recent years it has been truly nationalized and we have the nationalized parties that are genuinely distinct and represent genuine values and visions of america and we have a zero sum partisanship which is the thing that the framers feared. Host going back a little bit, but twoparty system essentially has survived for a century. Why has it endured and then we will get to the hyper partisan development and the kind of contemporary piece but historically it seems to have evolved into these parties seem to have been responsive to the National Crisis so i would like to hear a little bit more. Essentially we had a multiparty system that the parties themselves were these broad overlapping coalitions so that they were more flexible at the governing level in congress you could build different coalitions based on different issues across the parties that often the local political identity was more important than the National Political identity and that also allowed for a lot of politics that helped grease the wheels of the legislative process. I think in the era in which the local concerns were more it was just easier to build different coalitions of different kinds and now because they have become so distinct and they are both competing for this narrow but elusive compromise Coalition Building that the system of government depends on no longer works. Host we will get to the Solutions Later on in the conversation about the naturalization of the Political Parties. One thing that struck me sticking with Historical Development o piece, one thing that struck me is where our politics more in payroll during the earlier eras in the past century say during the Great Depression or the 1960s when of course we have scores of urban riots, protests, political leaders and Police Demonstrators outside the Democratic Convention in chicago. Im wondering if looking back you solve democracy under greater threat in the 30s to 60s than it is today and tell you whahowyou what kind of place parties in those earlier eras. Guest lets start with the 60s. An idea of violence isnt new. Maybe the idea that there was a peaceful age of politics it had always been nasty and timed a little while and but what was different i as the conflict over the civil rights were not hyper partisan. They were fought more within the party then between the party so in the civil rights bill there was a High Percentage of the republican members of Congress Voting for the major civil rights bill before they came to him that. So, what it meant is that these were difficult conflicts and certainly there were people that lost their lives in these conflicts. They didnt threaten the fundamental stability of the system because they didnt create a condition in which everything was at stake which is the situation we are in now creating these emotional politics and bifurcation of the country into two entirely distinct political coalitions undermining the basic legitimacy and fairness on which the system of democracy has to depend on and that is a fundamental challenge. The 30s was also a challenging time and there were a lot of folks that thought democracy had come to its head and perhaps since 1932 it turned out differently. All of which should remind us of selfgovernance and democracy is nothing we should take for granted that is a somewhat fragile thing and we have to think hard if we want to continue it. Host you describe a four party system, two parties within each party. My question though was there a bargain made on the issue of race and civil rights that the parties agreed for a number of decades to push the issue of jim crow and racial segregation aside to have these kind of harmonious and potential because once of course the civil rights was introduced, certainly in the south and isouth and in the norn particular they were high enough it was true for africanamericans is well. Guest in the 50s and 60s of course that comes from this was based on the exclusion of civil rights in the stage and the continuation of the jim crow south and politics and they have to have these conflicts we just have to figure out how to have them in a way that it set in motion the politics along the cultural and social identity lines which we now have the experience and culmination of. We did have Something Like a functioning four party system alongside liberal democrats and republicans and it wasnt perfect but in retrospect it meant you could build different coalitions in congress and congress i think it has been seen as much power to the executive branch as it has now. For a lot of the voters they didnt really stand for anything but at the functional level i think it worked pretty well and ultimately we ought to get back to Something Like that but with multiple parties so they can make the choices more clearly. Host you mentioned civil rights, so how do you explain the past several decades, how would you sum up especially in the 60s, 70s, 80s. The fractured media landscape that we hear so many pundits and scholars talk about, how would you explain the forces driving the rise of these National Parties in the binary polarization . You identified a few of them into the increasing salience at the National Level played a little bit into that as well. Thereve been two chapters in the book. In short, as americans became more prosperous, the pressing Economic Issues of the earlier era and the rising identity and cultural war politics and the parties took on more distinct and separate images so by the 1990s when the issues reached a level of national salience, democratic parties became more and these patterns and trends feed on themselves because they are more salient and the voters start identifying which party gets with the values better into the parties themselves change as liberal republicans disagree that it could disappear from the party and from the Democratic Party the National Identity of the party changed and the voters moved and shifted and thats what led to where we are today. Host you describ describe ie book and memo from Newt Gingrich who was the house speaker, the leader of the socalled republican revolution of 1994, and the memo was to the fellow republican colleagues how to describe democrats and im quoting from the memo from your book you recommended republicans use words to talk about democrats such as bizarre, destroy, devour, greed, pathetic shame and traders. Thats a pretty remarkable set of attributes. Does that kind of encapsulates a different level of rancor than even as we discuss it its alwas been bitter and brutal. Are they talking about something fundamentally new in the early 90s . Guest new90s . Guest Newt Gingrich did a lot of things. He encouraged his fellow republicans to talk in a much more aggressive way about democrats and also for the first time nationalized the election that ha had been run on local issues and gingrich noticed republicans kept winning for president although they lost in 92 but they were losing the Congressional Elections and he thought that the key was to emphasize these cultural themes that reagan had to some extent run on the. Gingrich is a complicated figure. He often becomes a caricature of everything was fine and then he took over and things went to hell but he was picking up on trends happening before and the only reason he came to power was there were a lot of republicans in the house that were tired of being in the minority and creating somebody that was more oppositional and the party had been the majority in the house for 40 years and they have grown a bit corrupt and there was an increasinglthat there wasan incg centralized leadership under speaker jim wright which a lot of republicans rebelled against because they felt like they were being cut out of the process which led to the rise of Newt Gingrich. I think he is an important player but he is a product of his time. Host the book is primarily about institution and gingrich probably in your rendering is more of a symptom. There is a reason that he emerged. I dont want to undervalue that particular time, but i think that they often overrate the role of the actors and transforming institutions when they are largely responded to pressure incentives and broad patterns. Host im going to get back to this but one of the things is to read the work on contemporary politics that isnt trump centric. Hes mentioned a couple of times but its quite refreshing given the litany of the stories and the focus on him. Getting back to the 90s and to bring us back to where we are today, you write that congress hasnt had a serious burst of lawmaking since 1990 and when i read that, part of me thought okay i know congress is functional. I used to work in congress with Richard Gephardt and the partisan warfare and at the same time enacted nafta, welfare reform, all of them we might disagree with but there certainly was that in the 90s. After 9 11, both parties seem to come together around Bipartisan National Security reform whether it is good or bad and then the passage of t. A. R. P. With response to the 2008 financial crisis so my question for the parties in the past two decades, have they been able to reach compromises and find a level of Common Ground especially in times of crisis or are these examples of exciting, really so exceptional to this toxic hyper partisan norm . Guest theres been a steady decline. I took about 1990s the major environmental Immigration Law and budget reform and americans with disabilities act which are all landmark legislation. Its not to say that there hasnt been a major Bipartisan Legislation since then but having four major bills in a year doesnt happen anymore and its been sputtering out since 2010 in which i would argue for the first time theres been a genuine twoparty system that is just basically nothing in terms of the Bipartisan Legislation the only legislation now that passes is the partisan legislation. Theres some stuff that passes in the criminal Justice Reform of 2018 that was something that its not if we are talking about the denominator which is the number of problems theyve called on to solve if we look at the enumerator it gets smaller and smaller. Host especially when it seems overwhelming that they support the common sense. The title of the book has this phrase to party doom loop. Can you talk about why it is so dire, why we cant escape this because as we know of course politics is never static. But it implies that there is a certain status that weve spiraled into a negative period in which there is no escape unless we have the fundamental prodemocracy reform. Guest so, what we have in this era is to distinct National Parties fighting over the zerosum conflict over the National Identity. If one party is democrat and has its corrine urban cosmopolitan america diverse multicultural knowledge economy and the traditional Christian America increasingly disconnected from the Global Knowledge economy and with two very different visions for governing america. Host the challenges they are in roughly equal power and democrats could win control of washington and republicans could win control of washington and we have had now going back to 1992 this longstanding era of pendulum politics for one party to the divided Government Back to divide, unified to the other and democrats may gain control after the 2020 election but they will probably only keep it for two years if they do. So, there is no the stakes are incredibly high an into ther in this era of trench warfare with no obvious resolution and both sides fear being in the minority and both sides think that they can win the majority, but it is a stalemate that neither side has any intention of ever backing down. And even to engage in political compromise is essentially to back down. So, it is just like you are stuck in a traffic jam and cant move because there are fundamental barriers. Host kind of like your Worst Nightmare being stuck in this endless cycle. Guest getting angrier and angrier and the forces in the system lead to more escalation is thas the states have gotten higher, people get more emotional about politics. You cant compromise on the other side people are cutting off friendships and more and more surrounding themselves with people who share their values and engage in information that reinforces themselves and now we have two sides that have fundamentally different relations to what is the true facts at this point. It was a kind of escape and won a number of state legislators that this had a kind of comic effect on some of the toxins. Guest sure if let out some of the steam, but its not a longterm solution that the majority isnt likely to be a permanent majority and once trump is out of office if of that energy will dissipate and then democrats will be disappointed with whoever they elect as president and will disengage. The big there are too many problems. One is there are a lot of pressing National Issues we have to deal with and state climate is probably the most important index essential that we are not dealing with it at all. And number two is this escalating hyper partisanship we are now fighting over a basic rule of who gets to vote and how the votes are counted. Host legitimacy. Guest democracy is always going to involve consensus or not th a political issue, but te challenge is we need to have a system by which we can agree that some set of rules are fair and some procedures are fair and they can abide by those outcomes and when things like elections are fundamentally called into question when we dont have any way to arbitrate disagreements, we dont have a democracy anymore. Host you write in the book that you are a democrat, but you say that the common argument that its really one party, the Republican Party that has become toto extremist, its gone off te rails, its become captured by the far right into that argument is these are deeper kind of systemic problems. Again this idea of the doom loop. Can you talk a little bit about why you think the arguments that democrats are right with moderates and liberals and people on the far left whereas republicans are really quite extreme. Guest republicans are a big party, too. I think that its flawed because first of all i do agree that the Republican Party has become incredibly extreme and by any historical or