Recorded on October 9, 2024, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era, by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
The authors were joined in conversation by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Mark Danner, Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics event series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
About Partisan Nation
The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras.
In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.
Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.
Watch the video above or on YouTube.
Listen to the panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
Podcast Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MARION FOURCADE] All right. Hello. I think it is Berkeley time. So thank you very much for being here. Welcome My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the Director of Social Science Matrix. And I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to today’s panel on Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era, just published book by our very own Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler.
I’m very excited about this book panel, not only because the topic is so urgent, but also because we have an all-star lineup to present, to discuss, and to moderate. So today’s event is part of our Author Meets Critics series, and it is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.
Before I turn it over to our panelists, let me briefly mention a few other upcoming events for the fall semester at Matrix. Tomorrow, we are hosting a talk by Ann Washington from NYU about the limits of predictive algorithms.
And then later in October, we will have two Matrix on point panel on the election. One that’s called Voices from the Heartland with Berkeley’s Arlie Hochschild. And then late in October, Shifting Alignments in the 2024 Election, looking at the changing electorates across the US.
And then in November and December, we will have our last two AMC Authors Meets Critics of the calendar year, a book on authoritarianism in China and health politics in China, and then another book on children without paper– migrant children without paper.
But before I leave the floor to our distinguished panelists, let me introduce our also distinguished moderator, Mark Danner. Mark Danner is a writer, reporter, and educator who, for more than three decades has written on war, politics, and conflict.
He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and the Middle East. And written extensively on American politics from Reagan to Trump. Danner holds the class of 1961 distinguished chair in undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and he is the James Clark Chace professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College.
Among his books are the Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, The Secret Way to War, Stripping Bare the Body, and Spiral– Trapped in the Forever War.
Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines.
He has written and co-produced two-hour long ABC News documentaries and an eight-part documentary series on US foreign policy and genocide. And he has received a very long list of honors for his work too long to cite them all, but including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999. So welcome, all. Welcome, Mark. And the floor is yours.
[MARK DANNER] So we’re a month less a day from the election. And I wonder how many of you, like me, feel like you’re going crazy with election news and can’t really even take it anymore. I wonder how many are desperate that it all be over.
And I wonder how many think that if the election goes in a certain way, the country will be irremediably altered, will be changed into something different, something unrecognizable. Can people raise their hands?
Well, that means that you fit right into this book, Partisan Nation– The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era. Polarization has been written about a lot, but this is by far the finest study and the clearest study and the most convincing study I’ve ever read about the subject.
Not only is it clear and convincing, it comes at an absolutely perfect time because, though it’s a work of respectable political science, it’s also very open to the general reader who is taking a very deep interest in what’s going on in our country during the next 30 days.
And it seems to me, situates some very critical questions and delves into them. One in particular is, have we reached this level of polarization before in the United States? Has it ever happened before?
It examines that question in a very interesting way. It also examines the question of the context that is the relationship of polarization of the political parties to political interests, to state parties, to the media.
And it makes, I think, an extremely convincing case that we are on a bit of territory the United States has never found itself on before. That this particular moment we’re in is unprecedented.
And the word dangerous, the dangerous new logic of American politics is very much, it seems to me, justified by the text of the book, which is, depending on the results of this election and then the future, we could be in a place where the defects in the United States constitutional system could become absolutely critical.
And in effect, the entire system could– they don’t say this in the book, but I’m going to infer it, begin to collapse. So that’s the good news. Having said all this, the book is a fascinating read. It’s bright, it’s smart, it’s completely up to date, and it is thoroughly convincing.
And I’m hoping today we can have a discussion that will take account, not only of the book, but of the election that’s looming over us. It’s hard to avoid it. It seems to me that the coterminous nature of this is completely unavoidable. Here we are.
So I hope I’m asking our panelists, both our co-authors and our respondents, to take account to some degree of the election in their remarks. What we’re going to do is everybody is going to have 8 to 10 minutes. We’ll then have the authors respond for a few minutes. Then we’ll have an open discussion here. And we will then throw it open to the audience.
And I’m going to introduce panelists as they speak. They have many books. They have many honors. I’m going to give you a slightly shortened version of these introductions. And we’re going to start immediately to my left with Paul Pierson, who’s the John Gross distinguished professor of political science at Berkeley, where he also directs the newly established Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.
He’s the author or the co-author of six books. And I’ll mention in particular, Winner-Take-All-Politics, which is a remarkable, extremely convincing study and dovetails very well with this book. It’s called Winner-Take-All-Politics– How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class. I guess I’ll ask you to start out with 8 to 10 minutes
[PAUL PIERSON] I think maybe I will do that. Thanks, Mark. And thanks to this panel of brilliant and busy people for sparing us some time and sharing their thoughts with us today. And thanks to everybody at Matrix for putting this event together.
I’m going to- I only have eight minutes or so. So I knew that Mark was going to start by talking about the election a little bit. And so I was reaching for the obvious metaphor that I think leads into a discussion of the book, which is right now, there is a storm heading directly towards the coast of the United States, a massive storm, which people will pay a lot of attention to and is going to have massive consequences.
But I think what we’re trying to do in the book is to say why so many storms? Why so intense over such a long period of time? And seeming to grow in intensity over time, which calls for a somewhat different kind of conversation.
And just in thinking about what’s happened with growing polarization in the United States, I think it’s worth just like taking a second to realize that Newt Gingrich, the Gingrich Revolution contract with America, which was seen as a startling intensification of political conflict– partisan political conflict in the United States. That was 30 years ago.
So this has been building for almost half a century now. And so what Eric and I try to do in this book is to figure out why is it so much more intense and seemingly so much harder to dislodge now than at other periods in American political history?
And we do spend a lot of time thinking about the constitution. The constitution was long thought to limit the prospects for intense, durable polarization. We refer in the book frequently to the idea of a Madisonian framework for politics.
And there’s a big asterisk there because those of you who know about the Constitutional Convention, Madison actually lost most of the big battles at the Constitutional Convention. He came away from it distraught.
But also thought that the Constitution was a big improvement over the lamentable articles of Confederation. And so he wrote these brilliant papers and Federalist Papers to explain how this new political system might work and what some of its virtues were, most famously, federalism 10 and federalism 51.
And so in there, he develops ideas about checks and balances, separation of power. Famous idea that ambition must be made to counter ambition. That’s the famous line. But also his ideas about the extended republic.
This really brilliant political theory movie in which he says we used to think you could only have democracy in like a city-state, but it’s actually much better if you have a far flung country where there’s an enormous diversity of interests, so that no single faction is likely to become dominant.
So you combine separation of powers with federalism in a large and highly diverse nation. And a lot of the– if you think about the system of representation that existed in the Constitution, it really emphasizes localism. People are elected from a particular geographic location in the United States, except for the presidency. Politics was to be grounded in localism.
Tip O’Neill’s famous line that all politics is local, a line that you don’t hear people quoting about contemporary politics very much for good reason, but that grew out of key features of the structure of the constitution.
And the result of this in Madison’s thinking was you’re going to get shifting coalitions. There’s not going to be any majority. And so the parties themselves are going to be relatively plastic, open to various kinds of groups. And there are going to be new issues coming up from below constantly.
Think about– you could use as an image like plate tectonics, and the way in which the Earth’s crust is being constantly recycled and reoriented in ways by things that are coming up from below. And it’s going to be impossible to sustain a single clean division in politics.
And we argue in the book that opened to roughly the 1960s, this basic logic was borne out. Doesn’t mean that there weren’t times of intense polarization. There were. I was telling my undergrads, Hamilton, the show Hamilton is basically a story of political polarization, of intense political polarization. There are other stories in there too.
But that’s part of what it is, the formation of that first intense partisan rift. But as we show in the book, it didn’t last very long. Even the worst case of intense partisan polarization, the Civil War, horrific as that conflict was, the partisan nature of it dissipates pretty quickly after the Civil War. Lasted roughly 15 years. And we go through that story as well in the book. So one could look at that and say, OK, the Madisonian logic of the constitution works.
But what we also try to show in the book is that this was not simply an automatic result from the Constitution, that it depended instead on what we call a constitutional order, which includes key intermediary institutions. And the ones we talk about in the book are state and local parties, interest groups, and media. And through most of political history, these have also been highly decentralized.
And just a side note for the political scientists in the room, I think one thing that we’re trying to do in this work, is to suggest a need for a thicker view of politics that thinks about this kind of meso level of social organizations and institutions as being really critical in political life rather than a more stripped down model which has voters, politicians, and a set of rules.
And that’s what makes politics work. And what we’re suggesting is you really need to think about these intermediary institutions to understand how things work. But through most of American history, these intermediary institutions were quite decentralized.
And as a result, they reinforced the centrifugal tendencies encouraged by the constitution, so that local things, there’s a lot of diversity in what’s happening in different localities. And the parties become pretty loose holding companies.
Always shifting and maybe with different messages and different parts of the country. Will Rogers famously said in the 1920s, I think, I’m a member of no organized political party. I’m a Democrat. And there was a powerful logic leading to that.
Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, all of these intermediary institutions nationalized in the United States. They become part of a national system more tightly connected to the two parties. We have two chapters in the book where we talk about how and why this happens. I’m not going to say a word about it.
Instead, I’m going to finish by noting a critical political event that happened just as this old constitutional order, relatively decentralized constitutional order, was drawing to a close. So just a couple of months more than 50 years ago, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency.
And there’s actually– by coincidence, there was the cover article in the New Issue of the Atlantic by Tom Nichols, which starts by talking about what a wonderful presidential character George Washington had. But it goes on to say, like most American presidents have had character, except for the former guy.
And in the course of this actually, interesting article about presidential character and about Washington, Nichols says even Nixon resigns at the end. But I think what Eric and I would suggest is that what’s changed is not the character of the president, but the political context in which all politicians are operating.
So back in 1972– and remember, really striking, like Nixon had just won in a landslide. And he was an extremely popular president, unlike Donald Trump, who had won without actually winning a popular majority at all.
But what happened? What happened was that Republicans at that point were a loose team. They were a team, but with enormous amounts of diversity that were being generated by that old constitutional order.
Many Republicans in Congress were eager to protect the powers of Congress. They cared about an executive that was usurping important powers that belonged to the Congress. Many of them hailed from states with moderate electorates.
Organized interests created crosscutting rather than stacking cleavages one on top of another, and most organized interests were only weakly aligned or not aligned at all with political parties. So you were not getting the message if you were a politician from organized interests that you have to stick with the team. You have to stick with the party team.
And these state electorates operated in information environments, decentralized media, largely non-partisan media. They were open to negative news about politicians from the party that they favored. So the informational environment, radically different.
So in that context, some national Republicans could and did break from Nixon. And that in turn created a self-reinforcing cycle, which ultimately undermined his presidency. Support for him gradually weakened across the board.
The investigations went forward. There were lots of prominent Republicans who said that the investigations were serious. You got the same message from the media. And so strikingly as these dynamics unfold, Nixon’s popularity starts to go down, not just among Democrats, not just among independents, but among Republicans.
It’s still much higher among Republicans than it is for Democrats. But it falls dramatically as Watergate continues to unfold. So by the end of that period– by the end of this process, Barry Goldwater goes to the White House and says there may be 8 or 10 Republicans who will vote not to convict you in the Senate, 8 or 10. And Nixon resigned.
Maybe that says something about his character. I’m not so convinced. You could just ask yourself, hypothetically, if Richard Nixon had been president, accused of the same things in today’s political environment where the pressures to maintain your connection to a nationalized team are much, much stronger, would he have resigned?
As we know, much worse actions by a president January 6 did not lead to anything like this kind of self-reinforcing cycle. So that suggests to us that we’re really in a very, very different political setting than the one that existed 50 years ago, and that the constitution does not function the same way in a system in which there are these intensely bound, nationalized partisan teams.
So today’s Republicans operating as in the language that Levitsky and Ziblatt used in their recent book, is semi-loyalists. They’re fair weather friends of the Constitution, but they’re willing to desert it if that’s where the political incentives arise. This may have less to do with their character than it does with the fact that they operate in a very different, more nationalized constitutional order. And Eric is now going to tell you more about that.
[MARK DANNER] Thank you, Paul. Eric Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott, professor of political science, and he’s co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies here at Berkeley. I’ll mention a couple of his books. Disjointed Pluralism– Institutional Innovation and Development of the US Congress. And Filibuster– Obstruction and Lawmaking in the United States Senate. Eric.
[ERIC SCHICKLER] I want to echo Paul’s thanks to Matrix for putting this event together and for our terrific panelists for sharing their reactions to the book. And so just to pick up in a sense where Paul left off, our argument is we retain the same formal constitutional rules of the game as before, but it’s now surrounded by a nationalized set of mediating institutions that are tied to each national party.
So state parties are now integrated elements of nationalized networks of ideological activists, campaign donors, and policy demanders. They no longer offer a distinctive, regionally-based input into party politics.
And I think a key part of the historical story in the book is that repeatedly when we have had polarization in the past, these state parties provided a kind of entry point for new interests to enter into party politics that cross-cut the parties. And that was a key part of how polarization basically eroded over time in these earlier eras.
Now that there are parts of these nationalized networks, instead of providing that kind of entry point, instead they tend to reinforce polarization. Similarly, interest groups are much more nationally focused and more closely tied to one or the other party.
And we have a more nationalized partisan media environment, especially on the right with the rise of Fox News and Talk Radio that send consistent messages to partisans across the US, in contrast to the decentralized press of the first 150 years.
In other words, we’ve had partisan press before, but it was largely a locally rooted partisan press that allowed different kinds of messages within a party across areas, whereas now it’s much nationalized.
And our argument basically is that our constitution is a poor match for this new political configuration. And that, that has major implications both for the quality of governance and the durability of Democratic institutions. I think I’m going to bracket the point about discussion of governance for the Q&A so that we have get to our discussions more quickly.
But I do just maybe want to flag the one point that if you think about the policy agendas of the two parties legislatively, there are distinctive kinds of opportunities and challenges posed by polarization and the associated legislative gridlock for Democrats as compared to the Republican agenda, which can rely more greatly on executive authority as well as judicial authority.
I want to spend most of the time talking about the impact on Democratic institutions. And we see two main threats arising. First is an entrenchment of minoritarian rule. And I guess here, it’s important to note that while much of the language of polarization is presented in the literature in a way that’s kind of symmetric about both parties, and we do argue in the book that there are important dynamics that are common to both parties.
There are also important asymmetries. And one of those asymmetries is rooted in the extent to which party coalitions now map onto urban rural divides in the US politics and our constitution gives decisive advantage to the more rurally-based interests and especially smaller states.
And so this is actually– and the first period in US history in during period where a party can consistently win a minority of votes for the Senate nationally and win a majority and control that institution, which if you think about our normal logic of what leads to moderation, if you can’t win power without moderating, then a party has to moderate.
But Republicans are able to win a consistent majority in the Senate without necessarily needing a majority. And there are similar dynamics in many state legislatures. And then crucially, they’re able to entrench these advantages.
So, for example, think about through domination of the Supreme Court, where Democrats have won the popular vote for President in seven of the last eight elections, but six of the nine Supreme Court justices are conservative Republicans.
And you can think about this ability to have a majority in the Senate and a majority on the court as allowing deck stacking to take place in a systematic way for favored interests, making regulation much harder, disempowering unions against campaign finance limits, allowing voting laws that are intended to make it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote.
Essentially, hacking the constitution, using hardball tactics that are allowed under the constitution or the court says are allowed to further tilt the playing field in their favor and entrench power. And so you can think about a gradual process of entrenchment that limits Democratic responsiveness.
Second main threat, which Paul talked about with respect to Watergate, is the threat of executive dominance and abuses of power. And I think that the key historical point here is Congress has played a key role in the past in checking presidential abuses. But the checks in the system are undermined by strong party teams operating across institutions.
And so one way to think about this is that these checks rely– its implicit parties are teams. Teamsmanship is consistent with how US institutions have always operated. But at the same time, it’s always counted on members of Congress having incentives. Where you sit determines where you stand and where you’re from determines where you stand.
And what we have now is a situation where party often trumps that. And as a result, that undercuts how ambition counters ambition. All right, so I don’t want to go– I was into too much depth.
But the thought experiment of thinking about what will– in a second Trump administration, the ability of these checks and balances to be exerted through Congress, we’re deeply skeptical of it because of this teamsmanship that will allow any investigation– would essentially prevent investigations under unified party control and undercut their effectiveness under divided party control.
So you might ask, well, is it kind of dismal portrait what can be done about this? And I want to note, we’re not confident about any specific solutions. This is not a book that says, here’s the silver bullet. This is what will solve this problem.
We do suggest some reforms that we think might help at the margins. And part of that has to do with trying to empower centrist factions that cross-cut the parties. So institutional innovations like fusion voting that might give some politicians in, say, swing states the ability to build these kinds of cross-party coalitions, undermining some of the self-reinforcing dynamics we talk about.
But given the serious threats posed by entrenchment by a conservative minority, we also think one of the main implications of our analysis is that if Democrats were to have a window of opportunity to enact policy changes, that they would need to use that window of opportunity to push in particular on democracy related issues.
So there are going to be a number of demands for that were to happen either soon or in four years or at some point in the future to their key policy demands that are urgently felt by their coalition. And in the past, Democrats have tended to prioritize those over political reforms, I think for good reason.
But I think the implication of our argument is that if the political playing field is being steadily tilted in a direction– in a contrary direction, they need to– if they have this kind of opportunity, they would need to think seriously about things that limit the rural urban bias, whether that’s new statehood admissions, about limits on gerrymandering, voting rights– legislation on voting rights, voter suppression to at least take a set of strategies off the table.
And to do any of this, of course, they would need to end the filibuster. And glad to talk about the logic of that. And our basic point is none of these are easy and none of these on their own are sufficient. But the implication of our argument is that a democracy agenda has to be a priority. It’s not going to be sufficient, but it’s essential. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MARK DANNER] Thank you, Eric. Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
We all remember his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, an international bestseller. His most recent books are Identity– The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, and Liberalism and its Discontents. Professor Fukuyama.
[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA] OK, thank you. I’m going to– can you hear me? I’m going to stay seated. So Didi and I are here to represent the other side of the Bay. We don’t want the East Bay to have control of American political science. So we’re performing a very important function here.
So I really like the book, and I want to congratulate Paul and Eric for it. It really brings together– polarization has been the focus of a lot of people in recent years. But I think you do a really good job of using the Madisonian constitutional framework as a way of understanding what’s really happening under the surface. So very good work on that.
As a comparativist, I must say that the problem that you describe is actually familiar in a lot of other countries. So for example, Latin America, unfortunately, copied our presidential system. Many Latin American parliaments are very divided and polarized and they cannot pass legislation.
And that leads to what they describe in this book happening in the United States, where actually policy is made by other parts of the government, by presidents or by the courts. And so polarization does not mean gridlock. It means that the real action simply moves to another part of the government.
And that’s Argentina, for example, presidents pass budgets by executive order. I mean, it’s really crazy that Congress doesn’t actually have any input into the basic function of government. But I wanted to make three comments about the different parts of the discussion in the book.
So the first is about media. You talk about how media has fallen into the same polarization that characterizes the political parties and so forth. I think that actually that media landscape has changed even since you wrote the book.
Like me and a lot of other people, we’ve been saying for the last eight years, yes, there’s polarization. There’s all these causes of polarization and there’s social media and the internet. And I just think that that’s become a much more important part of the explanation. And it’s partly qualitative.
I mean, the DW-NOMINATE scores can tell you about voting in Congress, but our polarization has this really very disturbing undercurrent of just complete fantasy. The Democrats are controlling a hurricane and sending it against Republican voting areas in red states.
I mean, stuff that had been completely– conspiracy theories that were completely outside the Overton window of normal political discourse are now inside that window. And I don’t think that, that would have happened if you only had Fox News.
And, in fact, I think Fox News has 1.2 million regular listeners. It’s not very big. Joe Rogan has 12 million, just by himself. And there are other influencers that I think are actually shaping the national conversation and permitting the kind of extreme forms of reality perception that really characterize, especially views on the left.
Now, the second thing I want to bring up is the discussion of the courts and the court’s relationship to the executive branch. So one of the sources of diversity that continues to exist in this country is the bureaucracy, both on a federal and a state level.
You have many commissions, multi-member commissions that by law, have to have bipartisan control. You have different parts of the bureaucracy that have become bastions sometimes of resistance against other executive branch policies.
Republicans are completely aware of this. And they’ve been claiming that the bureaucracy is captured by the left and doesn’t respond to the will of the people. But it depends on which part of the bureaucracy you look at.
The border agents and policemen and parts of the military are not captured by the left. And so it depends on what part of it you’re looking at. But it is a separate area where the dominant party really does not exercise full control. And they’ve got plans to fix this.
So one of the things I personally been very worried about is the stuff that’s contained in the now discredited project 2025, which I think still actually remains a living part of what a Republican administration would seek to do.
At the end of the first Trump administration, they had this executive order creating Schedule F that would allow them to fire basically any federal bureaucrat. You think about some of the positions that are currently for cause positions where it’s very difficult to remove people like the head of the IRS.
Richard Nixon actually wanted to get the IRS to audit his enemies. And you can imagine if you had a Trump loyalist in that position what that person would be able to do. And I fully expect that even though Trump himself has disavowed Project 2025, that this is so core to the thinking of so many people on the right, that they have to get control of the administrative state, that some version of this is going to be put in place.
And that’s why think that a second Trump term is not going to look like the first Trump term because they understand that personnel is their big weakness. They just didn’t have the people to execute or implement the policies that they wanted. And they’re going to try to fix that from the get go.
The other thing is they’re getting a lot of help from the Supreme Court. You didn’t go in great detail into, for example, Chevron deference, the decision– the Loper Bright decision that was taken at the end of the last term of the Supreme Court.
So conservatives will tell you that ending Chevron deference was really simply returning control to Congress and taking that authority away from bureaucrats that never should have had it in the first place. That’s a bunch of BS.
Because Congress is not capable of issuing mandates that can really direct the bureaucracy because of the polarization and other factors. So what it means is it’s a transfer of influence from the bureaucracy to the courts. And all of that stuff is now going to go back to the courts.
The original Chevron decision back in 1984, basically the court argued that the courts do not have the capacity to make decisions on how many parts per million constitutes a dangerous toxin. And therefore, the expert agencies had to have that power. But if you read the decision, they’re taking it back a little bit dishonestly. But that’s what’s happening.
There are other things that are going on. I’m amazed that more attention has not been paid to the Jarkesy decision, which also came at the end of the current– of the term that’s just concluded. This is a really powerful blow against the administrative state because the case underlying it was the SEC imposing a penalty on, basically, a fraudulent financial firm.
And the court in Jarkesy said, you can only do this with a jury trial, which basically just completely undermines the administrative cloud of the administrative state. And we’re going to see the consequences of this where you can’t even find a fraudster without basically taking this thing through a whole expensive long judicial process.
So between all of these things, there is an effort to move a lot of bureaucratic authority, reduce its diversity, and the checks that it presents and put it under the control of a conservative controlled court.
So then the final thing I’d like to say is that this whole book made me reflect on that Madisonian system as a whole. And it wasn’t that great a system in many respects. You could say that there are good forms of diversity and bad forms.
So the good forms, in the economy, some people fish salmon, other people grow cotton, other people do other sorts of things. And so that’s OK. But some of the forms of diversity that existed under the fully functioning Madisonian system were like a bunch of racists running segregated school systems in the South.
I was particularly amused since I care about good government that you mentioned that one of the things that has nationalized politics is the end of big city political machines and civil service reforms that required people being hired on the basis of merit rather than as political payoffs.
So you didn’t have local bosses that needed to be courted by the national parties in order to get anything passed. And in my view, that’s a good thing. But I think you’re right that it did have that effect.
The one thing I would like to raise as a question is that this Madisonian system really does– it’s required because of our electoral system. You say that I think in one of the concluding chapters, that if you didn’t have a first past the post electoral system, Duverger’s law wouldn’t kick in and you wouldn’t have a two-party system that then requires all this diversity within the two parties.
If you went to a European proportional representation or ranked choice voting, maybe you would have actually the diversity represented in separate political parties rather than in this big mush of diverse interests within these big tent parties.
That seems to me a pretty good argument for at least ranked choice voting. I mean, we should at least be experimenting with whether we can modify our electoral system to allow the diversity to actually be made explicit and explicitly represented within the party system rather than this old, very complicated, in a way very non-transparent Madisonian system. So those are my comments.
[MARK DANNER] Thank you, Frank. Finally, I’d like to introduce Didi Kuo, who’s a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. She’s a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption, and clientelism, political parties, and institutions, and political reform.
Of her books, I’ll mention the forthcoming one, which is The Great Retreat– How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t.
[DIDI KUO] Great well, first of all, Thank you so much– can everyone hear me? For having us today. It was really such an honor and pleasure to read this book. And I want to congratulate Eric and Paul on yet another major contribution to the study of American politics and democracy. The hits just keep on coming.
And I wanted to focus on two reactions that I had while reading this. The first is, as a political scientist, I think the book does a really good job walking this narrow tightrope of having a really clear argument that is theoretically and conceptually robust, that gives us a really clear research agenda for the future, but that is also really broad in its historical scope and in the integration of a lot of what we would call variables that discuss polarization into a coherent analytical framework.
So that was really satisfying to read. But the other perspective I had was, as a citizen reading this book, it was really depressing because I am holding on to the hope that if Kamala Harris trounces Trump in four weeks time that maybe he’ll disappear, the Republican Party will reconstitute itself, and that will have just been an eight-year fever dream.
And this book disabuses you of the notion that that’s even remotely possible. So I’m going to focus these comments on the scholarly implications of the book so that I don’t depress us further, although I will note that I think the most relevant personal fact, to this discussion is, I grew up in Newt Gingrich’s congressional district outside Atlanta.
And at the time when I was a teenager, I thought it was so cool that he was a political science professor, which turned out not to be cool. He did a lot of bad things in our politics. But maybe the real answer to all of this is one of you should become the next Speaker of the House. And you can ride this ship.
So I wanted to focus on three contributions of the book that I think lend us a lot of food for thought. The first has to do with this meso level institutionalism that Paul already mentioned. The book does a really good job explaining why we can’t look at formal institutions alone, but in fact have to look at them alongside the mediating institutions that exist.
Now we have a lot of examples from the literature on Democratic backsliding and the real life examples of democratic backsliding that the sequencing of this is usually an illiberal leader is elected to power and then quickly dismantles the formal institutions.
So sometimes this happens secretly because it turns out institutions are just individuals who can be replaced, but also they very actively go after the media or the opposition as well. Whereas the sequencing and partisan nation is a little bit different.
Paul and Eric argue that the systematic weakening of the meso level institutions, the mediating institutions, happened through a process of nationalization. So they weren’t really under direct assault by an illiberal leader. But instead, there was this structural change over time, beginning in the 1960s that lent them sort of a vulnerability by the time you get intense partisan polarization.
And I kind of wonder about, first of all, whether or not nationalization is always weakening. If we look at the 19th century United States, the process of nationalization that integrated really disparate rural and urban areas through the railways and that led to national communications fostered democracy.
And this is a story of modernization theory and comparative politics as well. You need to have some national interest that can be clearly delineated in order to create political demands. And the progressive movement was a national movement that went after corruption.
We know that federal authority administratively expanded in the 19th century as well, which led to a sort of modernization of governance. So I’m wondering if there are thresholds when nationalization is a problem versus when it’s not, or if we would know ex-ante that nationalization is going to be a problem.
And to return to this question of backsliding, I also wonder if nationalization is a necessary condition for backsliding to be effective, because we know that in a bunch of countries that have experienced backsliding, sometimes their institutions were strong and sometimes they were weak.
But if you have a really ambitious and entrepreneurial, illiberal leader, they can undermine those institutions no matter what. So I wonder if there’s just something about formal institutions that is more prone to attack these days because democratic publics are just losing faith in them to begin with.
A second point that I think is raised by the book that provides a lot of food for thought is this localism point. I think that the book is really compelling and pointing out why to have the kind of pluralism that fosters the Madisonian constitutional vision, you need a really distinct local element.
And it needs to be able to be translated into our political parties and our national governing institutions. And in the 1960s, Eric and Paul argued that the managed advocacy revolution and the kind of nationalization of interest group representation made it much more difficult to have this kind of localism.
But localism hasn’t gone away. And one thing that is absent from the book is a mention of people and how they are participating in politics. And there are two trends that I’d be curious about your thoughts on.
The first is there has been massive protest in the past few years. In 2020, for example, many Americans participated in the largest protests for racial justice in the nation’s history. And this mirrors a trend globally of massive protest where citizens are increasingly taking to the streets because, according to some analysis, they maybe can’t achieve systematic change at the ballot box.
And usually, protest politics ends up manifesting itself in your national politics somehow. But we don’t necessarily see that happening in the narrative of the book. And I’m wondering why. And the second trend is that localism exists, like we all live in local communities.
We know from Eitan Hirsch’s work on political hobbyism that the worst kinds of partisans are the ones who don’t participate at all in politics, but are instead kind of liking partisan messages on social media. But he finds that when people do get involved in their communities, particularly when working on small bore solutions to problems, they can build and sustain a political momentum.
And if we think about the 1990s literature on social capital, we know that the practice of community engagement can create more trust interpersonally and also institutionally. It can create a sense of political efficacy.
So are there promising examples of civil society activism or local politics that you see maybe having resonance or are our mediating institutions just too weak to be able to effectively absorb them?
And I did want to go back to the democratic backsliding conversation, which is in a few examples from the past two years, Brazil re-election of Bolsonaro, France’s re-election– well, I guess she made it to the final round again, Marine Le Pen, and also Poland’s election in which the Law and Justice Party was once again competing.
You had these coalitions of pro-democracy, civil society, and opposition groups that came together, set aside their political differences, which sometimes were quite significant, to say that our number one goal is to block the anti-democratic leader.
We also saw a huge, massive uprising against Bibi Netanyahu’s judicial reforms prior to October 7th of last year. And I’m wondering what it might take in the United States to get the same kind of uprising or kind of crosscutting movement in support of democracy, or if you think that’s possible.
And the final thing to note is about political reform, which Eric spoke about. I urge everyone to read the chapter in their book on political reform because there are so many reform options on the table. And one thing that’s promising but also perilous about this moment in American democracy is there’s more interest in appetite for political reform than there has been, I think, in my lifetime.
And there are just so many options on the table, ranging from your colleague Chemerinsky saying that we should just rip up the constitution and start anew, to Lee Drutman arguing for proportional representation in Congress, which seems very unlikely to happen, as you note, to really smaller things like small donors in elections and ranked choice voting, that kind of thing.
I think that the peril of reform is that there is an enormous amount of time, energy, and money going into these reform efforts. And there’s a real shiny object problem, where every two years, you have a lot of people backing the one reform to rule them all.
And Eric, you say there’s no silver bullet, but the fact is that these resources are being spent. So if you had to pick a reform that you think would have the most effect, which is a really annoying question and I can never answer it when it’s posed to me, what would you say?
And maybe institutional reform has less of an effect than something that would reform the mediating institutions that you talk about, like something like supporting local journalism or a liberal federalist society is something that people have also talked about for the judiciary.
So what is the relationship between all of the energy that’s going into reform, but the very disparate kinds of things that are on the table and the things that will have the most impact? But I just wanted to conclude by thanking you for this book, which was so fun to read, and everybody should read it. And it’s going to start so many really productive conversations about the state of our democracy.
[MARK DANNER] Thank you. Thank you, Didi. Thanks, everybody. I’m going to please–
[APPLAUSE]
I’m going to ask our authors to take a couple of minutes to respond. But I want to say– take the privilege of the chair here and say that I was struck by something Frank said, which is the role of fantasy. I’ve been covering this election and spending some time at Trump rallies.
And I’m struck– I was at one in Las Vegas the other day, and I’m struck by the degree to which I’m supposed to be a journalist. And this entire rally is floating on a sea, not of lies, lies don’t capture it, but fantasies.
And we are seeing a press, whether regional or national, now it’s almost entirely national, utterly unable to cope with this. It simply is faced with social media. Faced with the stovepiping of the current media. It’s unable to cope with these things.
And as we speak, as Paul began with the great image of the hurricane coming ashore, that hurricane is becoming the main issue on the Republican side and the complete failure of the state to do anything to help those who have been hurt by the previous one and will be hurt by this one.
And all that is a complete fantasy. And it’s remarkable to me that, that in the last several weeks of this election can essentially be taking over the information war. And I’m not sure, the remarks in the book about nationalization of the media are melancholy and persuasive.
But I agree with Frank that they don’t necessarily go far enough. There seems to be a difference in kind rather than just a difference in scale. So I hope we can talk about that. Please why don’t you each take three or four minutes to respond, and then we’ll open this up?
[PAUL PIERSON] OK, can you hear that? I’ll try to be brief because that allows me to duck a lot of issues and save some others’ for Eric. Great comments, really. And I appreciate the nice things you said about the work too.
I’ll just maybe pick up on a couple of things that Frank said and focus on one of the many interesting issues that Didi raise. I mean, I think, Frank, I think we agree with you on all these points. And the media is really hard– is hard for social scientists to study, to try to really measure the impact of it.
We’ve had David Brockman here who’s done a great job on that recently. So I think social science has lagged behind the rapid change in media. But I think– and we try to convey this in the book. And I think there is growing evidence about the powerful impact of Fox and other forces on the right, just how important they have. And as you guys say, that’s only been amplified recently.
There’s an article in The Times this morning, the big thing in Republican campaign ads now in national elections is trans athletes, trans athletes. they’re letting trans people compete in women’s sports. And that’s like the thing that is in most, including ads, ads about Kamala Harris in negative ads about Kamala Harris.
And so that plays into this is like the big national issue that we’re going to argue about. But of course, Fox News has been beating that drum for a long time. It doesn’t actually rely on social media to get it out there.
So I agree that social media seems to be just turning the dial to 11. But the dial has been at 10 for quite a long time. The point about the courts, we completely agree with that. I mean, it is and we actually– I mean, book is covering a huge amount of ground, but we say like the most powerful policy maker in the United States now is the Supreme Court. It’s close.
And just if you think about that for a second, do you want to code the United States as a democracy? When that is the case and Democrats have won the popular vote in 7 out of the last 8, it’s almost certainly going to be 8 out of 9 presidential elections, but they only have three seats on the Supreme Court, there is no way to remove these people.
They can be on the court for 40 years. They can do whatever they want, pretty much. I mean, that is– and including lots of decisions like the ones that you mentioned, that to the extent that people are aware of them, they’re extremely unpopular.
So if elected officials did things like that, they would run the risk of not being continuing to be elected officials. But the Supreme Court really doesn’t have to worry about that very much. So I agree with you. That’s just a huge thing.
So Didi, there’s so much there. I want to pick up on this point about the comparative– thinking about this comparatively. And one of the things that we do try to do in this book when we were trying to do too much. So again, very wide ranging.
We are trying to connect the discussion of what’s going on in the United States to this broader conversation about Democratic backsliding. And the kinds of things that make countries vulnerable.
And, of course, it’s not just one thing. It’s not just one story. But we draw in a lot of ways on that literature. So I’ll just give one example that’s very germane to what we’re doing, which draws on Guillermo O’Donnell’s work, in which he talks about how democracies have a system of vertical accountability and a system of horizontal accountability.
Horizontal accountability means basically checks and balances. Vertical accountability means the people hold the government accountable. And what we suggest in the book is that in the United States, the system of vertical accountability, of electoral accountability rests in significant part on horizontal accountability, because that is where voters can see that something has gone wrong, that somebody is behaving like an authoritarian.
So that was the Nixon story. You start to see this division at the national level, the politicians, and that sends messages to voters amplified by nonpartisan media that everybody is consuming. That world does not exist anymore. So no horizontal accountability means it is much harder to get vertical accountability.
So I think we’re not saying that the process of democratic backsliding looks exactly the same in the United States. There are other ways in which you can get into trouble. And there were some people, when we did a book workshop around this book, very smart, prominent political scientists said, this is happening everywhere.
We don’t really need a story about the United States. We need a story about the rise of right wing populism. And we do think you need a story about the global rise of right wing populism. But it’s also true that a lot of comparative work suggests that the two biggest protections for a democracy, if you just want to say, what are the variables that if you mark– if you score high on them, you’re not going to get democratic backsliding?
How wealthy are you? And how long have your institutions been in place? So that makes the US– the fact that the US is in the company of countries like Hungary and Brazil actually makes the US a huge outlier when you think about the fact that we’ve had our institutions for so long and we’re very wealthy country.
And we think this nationalization, combined with the constitution, really helps us to understand why the United States is more vulnerable to what’s happening in a lot of poorer, less, well, institutionalized countries.
[ERIC SCHICKLER] Yeah. Thanks so much for both of those sets of comments. Super helpful. I think maybe build a little bit off of Paul’s comments, we thought about– I think in terms of the backsliding comparative point, one of the– and I think this connects to Frank’s point about well, our electoral system, the two partyism, are institutions giving rise to this two-party system effects the ability to counter an anti-democratic leader?
The coalition in France that get against is a cross party– multipartyism is crucial to it. Prior– for much of US history, while we had an ostensibly two-party system at the national level, there were important openings– initially in the 19th century for third parties that were locally rooted or regionally based to force issues onto the table that the national parties didn’t want to deal with.
You could think about the progressive movement as a kind of cross-party, often used third-party strategies to influence. And those, partly due to changes in electoral rules, banning things like fusion voting, as well as nationalization of our politics, those are gone. You don’t have that Avenue for regionally-based third party movements that could play that brokerage role.
So one of the key reform questions is, are there ways to create functional equivalence of that? And so that’s where reforms like ranked choice voting and fusion voting come in as at least the potential to create those kinds of coalitions.
Because one way to think about it is the Madisonian system survived for so long because, as Nelson Polsby put it, we had 100-party system. Now we have a two. That was always an exaggeration, but it captured an element of truth.
Now that we have this two-party system, these kind of rickety machinery becomes really problematic. And I guess just the one other point I’d want to make in response to actually one of Frank’s comments is one of– the Madisonian system, you’re right.
This book is not a celebration of the Madisonian system as it used to be. We go to great lengths to think about the systematic problems with it. Our claim is that the problems for democracy that we had before were different from the problems we have now.
Not that they were in one sense benign and now they’re not. But I just want to point that it’s easy to get lost in these discussions of polarization. It used to be this well-functioning democracy. Now, it’s not. That’s not our argument at all. But our current configuration has distinctive vulnerabilities that we haven’t had before.
[MARK DANNER] Well, I’ve been thinking about vulnerabilities as you’ve been talking, and a word I would use is apocalypse. I’ve been going to these rallies. And one of the things that strikes me is the degree to which the rhetoric is about the end of time.
On the Democratic side, if this election goes a certain way, there will be the end of democracy. The system, as we know it, will be extirpated. It will be something beyond that. And the interesting thing, which I think not many of my friends know is that the other side is saying exactly the same thing.
That if you go to a Trump rally, he simply says, if you don’t vote and vote in a certain way, we’re not going to have a country anymore. Our country is going to be destroyed. Kamala Harris is dumb as a rock. She’s going to– but it’s not just that she’s dumb, I mean, this incredible, just incredible language.
And it makes me think A, whether that is completely historically unique, whether we’ve ever been in a situation like this or whether you could compare it to 1876 or some other election, number one.
And number 2, what are we looking at after the apocalypse? I mean, obviously, when we’re talking about Democratic backsliding, we’re talking about, for example, the night of the election, counting the votes. What happens in the following days. The election going into the courts, the advantages, as Frank and Paul both pointed out, of certain Republican judges in the court system, what comes after the apocalypse.
[ERIC SCHICKLER] I mean, just real quickly on that point, we’ve had elections in the past where both sides thought the stakes were existential. And in some cases were. Well, I think what’s unusual now is having the sequence of elections.
Basically, if you go back to 2000, pretty much each election has felt that if you look at the rhetoric and it’s just been increasing and mounting. And so I don’t think it’s distinctive to– this particular election feels and is distinctive.
I don’t want to deny that. But the idea of both sides saying the stakes here are 1800, that was the case. 1876, that was the case. 1860, that is the case. 1896, that is the case. But it’s not– you wouldn’t see that for 20 years with it just ratcheting up.
[MARK DANNER] But how do you account for the degree of fear that’s being expressed? And obviously, this fear, it isn’t just as it were, academic question. I mean, there have been two assassination attempts on Trump. I mean, many people are expecting violence at the polls. Who knows whether this will happen.
But how do you account– I mean, I’m struck at the Trump rally by how frightened people seem, how incredibly threatened they seem. I suppose part of that, you could talk about what Frank said about fantasies. But is that all we’re talking about?
[ERIC SCHICKLER] I think we have not talked– I mean, as much in our presentation about the asymmetries between the parties. But certainly, if you think about the media structure, there’s an important asymmetry there.
And so I don’t want not to oversimplify, but on the right, the media structure has fed various narratives, some of which are rooted in actual things Democrats want to do, many of which have no relation and have created that sense of existential stakes.
I think my own view is that– or our view, I think, is that on the stakes of what Trump would do is rooted in actual experience. Like one could make the argument that– if you think about Mitt Romney in 2012, one might say that the rhetoric outpaced– the rhetoric on the left about what it meant outpaced the reality. I think that’s a reasonable claim to make. I think by the time we get to 2020 and 2024, I don’t think that’s the case.
[PAUL PIERSON] One thing– we didn’t have time to talk about this. I mean, I do actually think these chapters about what changed are cool. They draw a lot on Eric’s wonderful racial realignment book, and the critical role of the Civil Rights movement and kind of pivoting American politics to a system in which it was clear which was the Liberal Party and which was the more Conservative Party.
And a lot of things feed on that. But over time, what happens is the stakes in American elections grow. How different the world is going to be if one side wins or the other side grows. And you start to see– and that feeds on itself in various ways. It feeds on itself with interest groups.
So you see interest groups picking a side, because if you care about abortion, whichever side of that issue you are on, it becomes increasingly clear that which party controls the presidency and controls the US Senate is going to determine which party, not the individual politician, which party.
And so the groups start to join sides, and that just reinforces it. It just creates this more– so we say in the book the things that used to create breaks, things about this more decentralized system of intermediary institutions that used to create breaks on polarization. Now actually they become engines of polarization.
So the stakes have grown in ways that really are very real. And, I guess, the other thing like fear sells. Fear sells. It certainly sells on the right. And I think it’s interesting to actually think about the differences between the right and the left.
And of course, I have my own, like, yeah, January 6. That’s something to be fearful about. That’s like a real thing. That’s not a fantasy. But, Harris is actually, I would say not selling fear. They actually made a– Biden was to a fair extent. But I think they made a conscious decision that actually that wasn’t what they wanted, even though I think they probably do think that the effects are– that the stakes are.
Turning the page is actually an appeal to get out.
Yeah. And you want to sell– you want to offer hope and stuff like that. But on the right, and certainly, and again, I think media is much more of a driver of what’s been happening on the right. I think that whole– the media environment is just very different on the Democratic side.
And so I do think one thing that we struggled with in the book was we did want to talk about polarization because we do think the development of these two parties as teams all the way down is extremely important.
But the danger in any discussion about polarization is you start to act as if the two parties are the same. It’s just mirror images. And we know there are lots of– a lot of journalists want to talk that way. It allows them to be objective, to think of themselves as being– a lot of political scientists want to talk that way because it allows them to appear to be objective.
But the differences between the two parties, they’re both affected by this nationalization, but they’re affected in quite different ways. And actually thinking about these mediating institutions, I think helps us to understand the ways in which they’re different.
The appeal of a minoritarian strategy is just much greater on the right than it is on the left. The idea that democracy, true democracy in which majorities are making the decisions, that is a threat on the right in a way that it is not a threat.
[MARK DANNER] Frank, Didi, do you want to comment on that, the issue of fear or the– Didi. No. I think I will– since we have 10 minutes left, why don’t I throw this open to our audience. Yes, sir there.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] I think this analysis is very convincing. I’m not quarreling with it at all. But one thing that hasn’t been mentioned specifically, I’d really be interested in whether you guys think that this has played a role in the polarization that you’re talking about.
And what I have in mind is the decision of the Republican Party in the 1960s and ’70s to develop the Southern strategy, which is also a religious strategy because of the overwhelmingly evangelical character of Southern Whites.
And what I kept thinking about when you were talking about this is the overwhelmingly Manichaean understanding of the world characteristic of this evangelical culture. And until the Republican Party catapulted them from the margins of public life to its center, that manicheanism, which you can see, I mean, throughout, all through the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, it’s really there.
But these guys, the leaders of the evangelicals, didn’t imagine that they would ever really run the country. So suddenly, they’re there and a lot of the fantasy, a lot of the apocalypticism, a lot of the manicheanism of the extreme polarization.
At least it looks to me like it has something of an evangelical base. And therefore, the decision of the Republicans, I was struck by 2015, all 32 senators representing the coastal states, only two were Republicans, because by that time, the Republicans had decided not to try to appeal to an educated electorate. So they stopped going after those states, so that you have a very distinctive voter base. And anyway, isn’t that decision central to what happened?
[MARK DANNER] Thank you. I think we’ll collect a couple of questions. And I want to mention in response to that question that if you look back at George Wallace’s speeches in ’68, it’s remarkable to what degree they foreshadow Trump. Quite remarkable. Should we collect another couple of questions. Sure.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Just a quick comment. In the 1950s, the American Political Science Association had– all right, all knows what I’m talking about. They bemoaned the fact that we had Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum parties. Don’t be sorry for what you wish for. One thing that didn’t come up, primaries, the McGovern rules. Do you have any–
[MARK DANNER] Yeah, that’s in the book. It did come up in the book. How about one more? Right back there. Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Thank you. I’m curious if you think that the legal class and if you want to call that the bar or the legal academic class should be also considered a mediating institution because the Powell Memo and the rise of the Federalist Society could arguably be considered a nationalization along partisan lines that maybe wasn’t nearly as explicit prior to that.
And they also temporally overlap with that process that you identify in so many of your other meso institutions. So I’d love to hear if you think that should be considered such an institution as well.
[MARK DANNER] OK. Paul, do you want to start on that?
[PAUL PIERSON] I’m going to let Eric. I think a lot of these are right in his wheelhouse.
[ERIC SCHICKLER] All right. So first, a question about evangelicals, yes, that is– and the way you frame it is a little bit differently from how we discuss it in a useful way, I think. Our argument, though, is that the racial realignment is pivotal because of unleashing the entry of the Southern White conservatives into the Republican Party, which then meant, as each new social issue came up–
Think about abortion, guns, sexuality, gay rights, The base of the Republican Party increasingly included that constituency. And at the same time, driving away gradually from the Republican Party, the northeastern establishment moderate wing.
And so we see the racial realignment as the kind of essential first step in that process. And we talk about why Republicans had an incentive to capitalize on that, that basically, they had the opportunity they saw to create a conservative majority or a powerful electoral.
At the time, it seemed like it may well be an electoral majority, and for moments, it was, by appealing to that. But the Manichaean point as an element of that, I think, is something we don’t develop. But that’s quite useful.
[MARK DANNER] It’s worth noting that Lyndon Johnson was aware of this right after the Voting Rights Act passed. He predicted it.
[ERIC SCHICKLER] Yeah. No. So we view that as the critical first moment. On the point about the legal class, I think we– so we do talk about the Federalist Society. We thought about it in terms of basically policy demanding group.
So in other words, as part of the group realignment story, the Federalist Society bringing together kind of pro-business interests and over time, religious conservatives and bundling them together in through this legal strategy.
So we don’t necessarily think about the legal system as a separate mediating institution. But that’s not to say that that’s not a super useful move to think about, and especially going back to Tocqueville, the role of the legal class that is, yes, sound extremely promising to think about.
Then the point about primaries, yes. And political scientists have wrestled with estimating the impact of primaries on polarization. But we think that one of the key points is that having voters pick candidates through direct primaries in an era of sorted parties is very different from an era of unsorted parties.
So when primaries are first introduced, it didn’t promote polarization, because if you looked at the constituencies of both parties, it spanned ideologically. Like direct primaries for Congress existed from 1910s, 1906, and it didn’t create polarization, we would argue.
But primaries plus this into this sorted electorate, which is what happened in the wake of McGovern Frazier certainly, we think, changes the incentives of politicians where the concern on the right, especially has been about being primaried.
And so the way to avoid that is to be a loyal team player and be as conservative. Up until recently, it was– and still to basically now, be as conservative as possible so you don’t get primaried. And that obviously overlaps with geographic sorting, redistricting strategy. If you worry more about– if you have less worry about a general election, the primary looms more large– looms largely.
[MARK DANNER] Didi or Frank, do you want to comment on any of these?
[DIDI KUO] I want to weigh in with something Paul has written about, which is this– so one thing that someone mentioned is how the Republican Party mobilizes the working class or non-educated voters.
And this educational realignment has happened in the United States, but also in most of the advanced democracies of Western Europe, where you used to have an identifiably social Democratic Party on the left that had an overwhelming economic ideology that was supposed to be cross-cutting, like across racial and ethnic and religious cleavages, because it was about class instead.
And now, as you’ve had parties that are a little bit more similar economically since the 1990s, in particular, the working class has been more up for grabs. And Paul has written really persuasively about the nature of plutocratic populism, whereby the right has to wrangle together a difficult coalition of plutocrats and business, which is its loyal group.
But also has to use a lot of appeals based on fear and grievance to make sure that working class voters also give them the numbers to be able to win elections. And I think that, as the parties of the left become the parties of the educated urban professionals, that’s going to be problematic as well.
[MARK DANNER] Trump has been really most successful– and Lindsey Graham, when he said Trump is the only one who can build our party, he meant that he was the one who could most sufficiently scare people by this vision of hordes of Black and Brown people coming in to build up its non-college educated White base, mostly male. And you see that at the rallies very much so, that he’s a real artist at this.
[PAUL PIERSON] Maybe I’ll use that as an entry to say one slightly optimistic thing at the end of this. So when Eric and I were writing the conclusion, you’re supposed to say like, OK, now how do we fix all this.
And we gave a general public talk books Inc. And one of my neighbors was there and it was like I’d planted him there to ask this question. He said, well, when a chemist or a physicist describes something complicated, we don’t expect them to come up with some solution. Like it’s enough. You’ve done your job. And I said thank you. And we all went home.
But we do have this thing in the conclusion where it’s the kinds of reforms we’re talking about don’t really feel like they’re up to the scale of the challenge, though I do think have to think small things can feed on themselves. We believe in feedback loops.
And at the margins, they can make a difference. And that can make a difference. So they’re definitely worth doing. But I think something where I think there’s some grounds for optimism, though, maybe I have less optimism than I did a few years ago is demographic change.
So Lindsey Graham before he jumped on board the bandwagon, the Trump bandwagon said the problem with this whole strategy is we’re just not– they’re just not producing enough old, angry White guys. That’s not the demography of the country. Our supporters are dying off and the new supporters are different.
And I do think even though one of the most interesting developments, actually, I think in recent electoral politics is Harris is holding support among White voters overall. It’s not at all clear that she’s going to come close to matching the level of support that she has with Latinos and Blacks. And that could be the difference in the election.
So the idea that as the country becomes more diverse, that will make the coalition– this revanchist coalition, too small to be electorally competitive. I still think that, that may turn out to be right. I think there’s good reason to think that time is not on the side of this right wing populist movement. I’m less confident in that than I was a few years ago.
[MARK DANNER] I hate to think it’s my job to quash any optimism at the end. But I have to say that if Harris gets her current polling among Latinos and Blacks, she will lose. And we’ll have to– obviously, we’ll have to see what happens. But those numbers are distinctly worrying. And Trump’s penetration of those groups has been quite remarkable. And it’s a big story all by itself.
It’s 5:30. This could go on for a very long time. I implore you all to vote and think of the election and not go crazy. And I would ask you, I would thank our sponsors very much. Praise this book. You all should go out and buy it. And at least now join me to thank our authors and our respondents.
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