The Democratic Answer to Heritage Foundation

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In the 19 seventies, when wou get this new wave of conservative money going into and business money going into funding new think tanks. Ah, they are explicitly modelling all these new think tanks on what they think of as really liberal a precedent. So Air america becomes the democratic answer to right wingd talk radio. You get medium matters as the liberals kind of answer to all these conservative media watchdog groups. A, and as you see, some of centrf american practice is still around and nimportant a player. Some of these work better than others. The iron law of emulation doesn't always work out as intent. There's clearly something to the demographic and psychological predist predis

Shermer and Rosenfeld discuss: why we have a duopoly • gerrymandering • voting restrictions • how we know all elections are not rigged • abortion • immigration • US foreign policy • the rise of conservative and liberal think tanks • ideology • political polarization • political leanings of industrialists vs. tech billionaires and rural poor vs. urban poor • Trump and 2016, 2020, and 2024 (are we facing civil unrest as never seen before?), and more…

Sam Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, specializing in party politics and American political development. His research interests include the history of political parties, the intersection of social movements and formal politics, and the politics of social and economic policymaking. His book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization in the postwar United States. With Daniel Schlozman at Johns Hopkins University, he is currently writing a book on party development since the Founding, provisionally titled The Hollow Parties. His writing has also appeared in The American Prospect, Boston Review, Democracy, The New Republic, The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, and Vox.