Speaker 2
Right. So I apologize if I implied your political scientist. What I meant was- Oh, I don't take
Speaker 1
it as a negative. Actually, I take it as a compliment. I take it as a compliment. Somebody reads my book and thinks I'm a political scientist by training. Because I could- Because no, that actually is a political
Speaker 2
scientist. There's a lot of political science in there. But what I was doing was trying to evoke teen you up a little about that famous or infamous 1950s, E.E. Shat Snyder paper where the Political Science Tists Association of America said what we need is more ideological polarization or parting among the parties. That came to pass, not because the political scientists endorsed it. And that led us to the situation we're in now. And then you referenced rank choice voting, which to me I think is perhaps a pleasant little frippery that doesn't really change much. That's about the best thing I could say about it. It's benign, I think, at best. But it took a lot of effort. It took a lot of- There was a lot spent on it to try to get it to pass and it doesn't really do much. And then I think about the other thing that you mentioned, which is term limits. And they've been bad. And here in New York City, you can't even work with your local council member because they're elected once, you get to know them, they're reelected, and then they're lame ducks. It's a terrible system. My point being the unintended consequences point and the experts look at this to amend the system. And I think we've had a rather bad history of it. Now, I know you're going to say that doesn't mean that other better correct analysis reforms should not be taken just because we've gotten them wrong in the past. But that is how I see it. And from reading your book, that's how I see you see a lot of the past efforts of reforms proposed by very alerted people.
Speaker 1
So that goes to why I structured the book the way that I did, actually. And so I totally agree that just coming up with some theoretical construct is profoundly problematic because you don't know how it's going to play out. What we need to do is look around the globe and see what kinds of democratic systems face down threats to democracy effectively or not. And political scientists generally agree that the system that's the gold standard is the very one that I propose. This is not coming up with some construct that hasn't been tested. In fact, the United States system is the construct that hasn't been tested. Ask yourself this question. If you're testing the wisdom and soundness of a system, whether we're talking about an engineering system, a business model, whether we're talking about a musical genre or anything else, would you say that the ultimate test is, can I find a single example that has actually survived longer than any other or would you say the ultimate test is, has this system been benignly replicated again and again and again across cultures and societies? I think virtually anybody would say the latter, not the former, in our system of two-party presidentialism remains a recluse on the world stage. We have never successfully exported it, but MMP has been benignly adapted around the globe across different cultures and systems. So actually, your critique is my point. My point is that it is a mistake to just come up with a theory and then claim that we should change things. What I'm saying is no. We have to get past American exceptionalism and actually imagine we might learn from millions and millions of people in the experience of many, many countries throughout history across the globe. That's what we have to do. And when I'm proposing is not some untested theory, what I'm proposing is based upon the benign experience that actually has pretty broad consensus among people who have studied comparative systems. And so this is not some pie in the sky idea. This is grounded in reality. And it is actually grounded in the reality of nations that have either successfully or filled to face down their own threats to democracy. It's a distillation of learning across comparative systems. So this is different. Now I'll go back to the 1950s for a moment. So in that period of time, APSA writes this report that you alluded to that says the major critique of the parties is that they're insufficiently distinct. Think about this in the 1952 presidential election. The Democrats and Republicans both went after the same person to head their ticket Dwight D. Eisenhower. Five years later, an economist named Anthony Downs writes a book called An Economic Theory of Democracy. You probably never heard of him. You probably never heard of the book. But everybody has the model of that book in their minds. It's the single line liberal to conservative in the ideas of we have extreme candidates on each side. Eventually they converge on the center, what's called the median voter. And everybody has that model in their minds. And yet they all know it doesn't describe our politics today. And that's not impressionistic if you look at the Pew research data from the early 90s until now. What we see is not a standard distribution of voters, which is what's required for anxious voting to work. Instead, what we see is a bimodal distribution with the centers of the two parties moving further and further apart. We can have it with our politics and we can have it with our culture. And if we don't get the pathology right, we will not come up with the appropriate course of treatment.
Speaker 2
Mark Sterns Maxwell on book covers is Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Kerry School of Law and the author of Parliamentary America, the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy. Thank you so
Speaker 1
much. Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker 2
That's it for today's show. The show is produced by the quaint Mallards. Corey Warr is the producer and Joel Patterson is the senior producer. Michelle Pesca spearheads special projects for us at Peachfish to advertise go to advertisecast.com slash the jest. Uprogee Prudupru and thanks for listening.