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January 2022
Ep 3: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop - Lee Drutman, New America Foundation
Political scientist Lee Drutman on why the US has just two political parties and how would having more choices would reduce polarization.
Unbiased Podcast
Ep 3: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop - Lee Drutman, New America Foundation
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Show notes
[3:39] Why the US has only two major political parties.
[7:48] How to increases options in US elections.
[11:40] Independent voters or just confused voters.
[14:02] Proportional representation as a solution for more ballot choices.
[25:19] Andrew Yang and the Forward Party.
[26:39] How New Zealand changed to proportional representation
Transcript

Lee: Among people who studied comparative electoral systems, there was pretty much a remarkable consensus that the U S has just about the worst system of elections in the world.


Dan: I am very happy to introduce this guest for unbiased. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, a Washington DC think tank. He is the author of two books: The Business of America is Lobbying, and Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop; the Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America.
In addition to that, he is a lecturer at the John Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies writes regularly for FiveThirtyEight, holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA from Brown University. As you do.
I also bear the distinction of being the self ordained number one, Lee Drtuman fan boy. So it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you Lee to the show. Thanks for joining.

Lee: Thank you Dan, for that very generous introduction.

Dan: Yeah, meant every single word Lee.

Arjun: It's great to chat with you, Lee. As I mentioned before, I've been looking at some of your previous interviews... you are very well versed in this area. So I'm excited to ask you a bunch of questions, but actually before we get to the hardcore electoral reform kind of stuff, I'm just curious: why did you choose to become a political scientist? what drew you to this field? Did you think you were going to run for office at some point?

Lee: I mean, funny though, the political science training is the thing that, that leads you away from running for office, because you realize hard it is to do anything in office. No, I, you know, it's. Broadly interested in how our democracy works and figured going to grad school was a great excuse to, to hang out in Berkeley for a couple of years and read a bunch of books. So I've worked out pretty well.

Dan: Nice. And I know you, you did some time working in Congress. Was that before the degree or after the degree?

Lee: It was actually after the great degree, it was part of a fellowship through the American Political Science Association, which puts political scientists into Congress for a nine month period, which is like the perfect amount of time. I think. Get a feel for it. And then and then get out

Dan: Scared you straight.

Arjun: The book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop; the Case for a Multi-Party D emocracy... It's a great title by the way... because I feel like everyone complains about, our political system in the United States. Very few seem to be happy with it. And it feels like increasingly we hear people talking about why do we just have two choices.
So. before we go into sort of the depths of the book, tell us a little bit about the book. What's the gist of it? Why did you write it? All those kinds of things.
I wrote it because I was trying to figure out what the hell we do to make our democracy work. I think like a lot of folks I watched the rise of Donald Trump with first amusement, then horror, than terror, and wondered how our political system had gotten to this point, which sent me on a, a journey, looking back into the history of our party system and kind of how the parties had organized and shaped and why it was that Donald Trump was able to not only win the Republican party nomination, but also become the president of the United States.
a lot of that had to do with the way the two-party system had developed and, and worked with our geographical divides and other identity cultural divides in our society. And, you know, and I said, well, okay, seems like a pretty dumb system. Does anybody else do it differently?

Lee: Which, you know, I mean, I sort of knew that other people did it differently, but like a lot of people who have spent their entire life in the United States, I didn't really understand all that much, how other political systems worked. And so I started looking into that and, and reading a lot of the comparative political science work on electoral systems. And it struck me that among people who studied comparative electoral systems, there was pretty much a remarkable consensus that the U S has just about the worst system of elections in the world and that there were a whole lot of other models that were fair or representative and led to a more functional governing.
And so I said, well, okay, well, why, not try to make a case for this in the United States, people are very dissatisfied with our two party system. So there's obviously a sort of raw interest in this. And I think what people don't understand is how much our two party system is a function of our winner-take-all, first pass the post, single winner elections which, you know, are just a historical accident.
there's no reason we need to single member districts for Congress. Senate's a little trickier to change, but broadly, you know, the U S is really unusual in the world and having a two party system and one of the few countries in the world that uses a single- winner elections.
One question I have for you too, Lee is, you know, you mentioned first-past-the-post there, which for those of you who are not ensconced in electoral geekery such as myself means the winner is the person who wins one more vote than second place effectively. So that could literally be one more vote or that could be a thousand more votes. It doesn't matter.

Dan: Now, one of the things though is you do look at countries like Canada and the UK that use first pass the post, but still have a pretty strong, multi partisan tradition. And do you know what the reason behind that is why America ended up this way and those countries have, again, more than two choices on the ballot?

Lee: So there's a few reasons. I mean, the UK is basically a two party system with with Labor and Conservative. I mean, there, there are third parties that come and I guess the Lib-Dems are sort of the perennial third party, but it's basically a two party system. Canada is probably more of a, I mean, it's still a two ish party system, probably a two and a half party system, but there are more parties there. Now a couple of reasons that Canada has more parties. One is that Canada has more federalism. voters care more about parties at the, at the local level, or as much as they do at the national level. So also the sort of bloc Quebecois. It sort of plays weirdly into the party system.
Also, India has first past the post elections and India is even more of a federal system, so there's more parties. The other thing that all of these countries have in common is that they don't have primary elections.

Lee: So when the US went to primary elections there, were more third parties and because it became easy to contest one of the two major parties, dissidents stopped organizing third parties and just tried to take over one of the two major parties.
The other, thing is that in both Canada and the UK ballot access is a lot more liberal. That it's just a lot easier to get on the ballot. In the U S has the two parties have very strict ballot access laws.
But the main thing that contributes to the number of parties is the, the size of the districts. There are a bunch of other factors, but that's the biggest and most significant one.

Arjun: So let's say Lee, that you were king for, well, okay. You, you got to wave a magic wand

Lee: Don't make me king. I don't want to be king.

Arjun: Well, you said, you know, the U S election system or electoral system is one of the worst in the world. So if you could say, all right, you get to change three things. What are the three things that you would want to change about the way the U S does its elections? And then we can go into deeper issues.

Lee: Well, I would, first of all, make us say parliamentary system instead of a presidential system, which would basically mean that we wouldn't have a separately elected president.
I would make all elections to the House and the Senate based on proportional representation and then I would limit the powers of the Senate.
I do have a question to throw in there though. Cause you, you mentioned at the beginning, the, the rise of Donald TrumpThe one thing I did see is I did see our system of government as actually thwarting a lot of the things he wanted to implement.

Dan: So I almost felt like if we had a parliamentary system at that point in time, he would have had a much easier time implementing his agenda. What are your thoughts on that though?
I mean, we had basically a parliamentary system in that, you know, he had he had the Republicans in charge in Congress for the first two years. So, I think my response to that would be as if we had proportional parliamentary system, Donald Trump would have never become prime minister. I mean, there's no world in which he, he became the head of the party and was able to lead a coalition government.

Arjun: So Lee, this is interesting because I, I grew up in Canada, so I have some experience with that whole system and politics has kind of dull there and perhaps that's where a good thing it should be dull maybe. But, I felt like the US system where we directly elect our president is cool in a way that it really brings to focus what we care about as a nation. All of us are talking about the same stuff and look at the same candidates and saying we want A or B to be president. And I realize it's very simplistic, Why is it wrong for the people to choose directly their leader?

Lee: Wellthere is certainly an intuitive appeal to presidential ism and having a single leader. But the reality is that if you look across presidential systems around the world, you find that presidential systems are much more unstable then parliamentary systems.
And there's a simple reason for that. It's because the presidency is a winner take all office. And so what winds up happening is it turbocharges it's kind of majoritarian aspect of the voting system. In which one majority tries to rule over a minority.
So, your idealized version all Americans consider two options and we all debate them with each other and decide who has the best vision for the country. The reality of voting for the U S president, and especially recently, but always is that most people are either Democrats or Republicans. Democrats vote for the Democrat, Republicans are for the Republican. And you know, it's not really a contest of competing visions for the country that everybody is debating. It's about, you know, my side beating your side or my, so I listened to your side and that creates a I think a very dangerous mentality. That's arguably, another reason why the US has a two party system than Canada or the UK is because we have that single presidential office that, is a winner take all election, particularly with the electoral college.
You bring up that, you know, people that are either Republican or Democrats and they vote that way.Earlier this year you tweeted the Gallup, survey on, how do you identify politically. And it was 50% of Americans said they felt they were independents.

Arjun: And that's fluctuates over the years, but I think that's probably one of the highest rating. What do you make of that? That it seems so high that people think their independence yet they always vote. I mean, I guess those are your two choices. You're going to have to vote that way.
So it's true that people who identify as independents are voting either for Democrats or Republicans. So, so there are only two choices. However most people who are independents usually vote for one party or the other. So, political scientists would refer to them as closet partisans.

Lee: That is, that they're really partisans, they just like to say that they're independents. Saying that their independents is a form of rejection of the parties. And so there is a level of frustration that I think a lot of voters feel with the parties, even the ones that they vote for, or they just don't want to be seen as a partisan cause it's kind of a partisanship in American discourse in public life has kind of a negative connotation. The other thing that the important by the independents is that they are kind of all over the political map as well, even to, the extent that they vote for the party.
So it's not like there's like this fifth column of, you know, moderate, centrist independents out there . They're sort of a confused and confusing bunch and mostly tied together by their general distaste for how politics is going in the U S.

Dan: So do you think like those independents are really , like you said, closet partisans, or they're more the hold my nose variety of voter, who doesn't like the party they vote for, but really doesn't like the other party or you think it's like a mix of both?

Lee: Probably it's a mix of both. I mean, a lot of voters are voted or are motivated by hatred of the other party. It's just that they have only one other option to vote for. So they vote like Democrats because they really hate Republicans or they vote like Republicans cause they really hate Democrats, but you know, they don't really love Republicans or Democrats either.
So yeah, there there's a lot of lesser of two evils voting for sure.

Arjun: Of your three things that you said, if you had a magic wand, so one was, you know, parliamentary over president. The second you said was proportional representation. Talk to me about that because I feel like that is a really big deal. What does that mean? And why is that important to you?

Lee: Proportional representation describes a voting system in which a party gets the number of seats in direct proportion to the share of votes it gets. In practice, what that means is that we would have larger districts and we would have more parties.
Now there's a whole world of proportional representation systems that go from relatively modest proportionality, like the Irish system, or the German system, or the New Zealand system to sort of extreme proportionality, like Israel and there. But most systems are somewhat mixed in the middle. Sometimes people automatically go to, 'oh, we don't want to be Israel because they have like 15 parties' and, you know, that's,

Arjun: Yeah, they're a mess. They they've had like what four elections in two years.

Lee: Yeah. Although they have managed to form and hold a coalition government together now. I mean, we could have another conversation, about Israeli politics. All I want to do is, help you and your listeners understand that there's kind of a range of proportional systems and the larger the district size the more parties. I would say that probably around five or six parties would be the ideal and you could get to that probably with seven member districts.
You could do it with a couple of different voting rules. I tend to prefer the multi winner form of rank choice voting, which is used in Ireland. I think that's a good system. The Irish seem to like it very much. It's worked quite well for them. I think it would work well in the U S. The important thing is proportionality and really the important thing is having multiple parties. And the only way we're going to get to multiple parties is if we change the way we do elections, get rid of the single, single winner election that we use.

Dan: So I think I told you this, the last time we spoke, which is I discovered proportional representation looking into campaign finance reform. And what I saw was when you look at the democracies that have the highest level of voter satisfaction, the highest level of transparency, all of them have systems of proportional representation and the campaign finance laws actually are wildly inconsistent.
So Finland, for example, has a more liberal system for campaign finance and we do. What I see in proportional representation, as it touches a lot of issues people care about like campaign finance. What are some of the other benefits to proportional representation?

Lee: I think one benefit that a lot of people would appreciate is the fact that in a proportional voting system your vote matters no matter where you live. In our current system, single winner elections, most people are going to vote in elections and which I could tell you today, who's going to win that election.
And therefore, most people vote in elections where their vote doesn't count and candidates and campaigns are not really working to win their vote. In a proportional voting system, there are very, very few wasted votes. There's no gerrymandering or to the extent that district boundaries are drawn, they're not very consequential. Most importantly, I think it means that everybody gets a vote that counts equally and everybody's vote matters equally. From the voters perspective, also you get to have more choices.
Having more proportional representation produces more parties and voters can feel that they're voting for a party or candidate that they're excited about, not just somebody who they're kind of mad about, but who's the lesser of two evils. And moreover the parties themselves have to be a little bit more policy focused. In a two-party system you can just get away with being not the other party, but in a proportional system, you have to actually find a way to differentiate yourself.

Arjun: I really like that comment about- in a proportional system, your vote counts. Here in California, most Republicans are like, it's pointless. There's just no reason to vote. You know, on, on the presidential side, at least it's just not going to matter very much. So I can see that logic working or resonating with a lot of Americans. How realistic is it that we might see proportional representation in our lifetimes? Is this just a academic pipe dream or could it actually happen?

Lee: Well, I certainly think it could happen. There's already legislation that's been introduced- The Fair Representation Act, which has a number of co-sponsors. Sometime in this decade we'll have a real opportunity to remake American democracy, precisely because it's in such a crisis point.
So I think the challenge for those of us who care about the future of our country is to think about what is the system of elections and voting and representation that we think is best. And then to work towards building a collective understanding of what the best option is, and then to push and push and push until it happens. We don't know when the moment will be when it's possible, but I could envision that sometime in this decade, we will collectively as a nation say what we're doing is not working and we need to do something differently. And the question is what we do differently, and that'll depend on what the sort of consensus in the broader public is about what the best option ought to be. I think it's clear that our system is not working but it's not clear what the problem is, and it's not clear how to fix a problem that we don't understand.
So part of the challenge is understanding that the two party system itself is the problem. And if we understand that then we can move forwards towards a more representative system of government.

Dan: You know, ranked choice voting is one reform that's really gained a lot of momentum. And what I see in electoral reform circles is sometimes there, there tends to be a tendency to like nitpick different strategies and almost view ranked choice voting is not going far enough as PR. Do you view rank choice voting as a meaningful step towards it? Or do we really have to be pushing for both at the same time do you feel?

Lee: I used to view it as, as a meaningful step, but I think the urgency of what's happened in the last year has made me feel like we can't wait. We need to push for a full proportional representation now.

Arjun: By the way is the upshot of proportional representation that we get a bigger government or not necessarily.

Lee: Not necessarily. I mean, we could certainly increase the size of the house, which actually I just had an op-ed in the Washington post teasing a report I did with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences arguing for a larger house. So if we're doing proportional representation we should also increase the size of the house. I think they pair nicely together, but we don't need to. And a larger house is not necessarily a larger government, by the way.

Arjun: Oh, interesting. Why do you say that?

Lee: I mean, if you're thinking about the size of government, right? A larger house, doesn't necessarily produce more expenditures on government or a larger administrative state.

Arjun: I feel like there's a level of dissatisfaction with how the government works that is somewhat bipartisan. That both Democrats and Republicans seem frustrated with how their government functions and Republicans historically have always wanted less government sort of smaller government is one of their party platform things.
So if we are to get proportional representation to happen, and presumably we would need bi-partisan support to do this, then I wonder if one of the key tenants is, wait, are you just going to 2 X or 3 X the size of our government, in which case you're going to lose half the country. Versus no, it doesn't have to be, you can resize it and it could actually even be smaller, perhaps. Depends on how you, how you designed it.

Lee: Exactly. The way that we do policymaking which is this constant gridlock in which we lurch from thing to thing, and then the administration goes back and forth between different extremes. It is just creates tremendous inefficiencies and just also high levels of unpredictability.
And what you see in proportional systems is that you tend to have coalition governments. This coalitions shift from election to election, but they don't swing wildly back and forth. And so policy is actually more incremental and more, I would say, rational because it's not just about parties trying to squeeze as much in as they can in a limited window that they have or gum up the works for the other side, it's about kind of building policies that will last.
If I'm somebody who's running a business, like I actually want that level of predictability. And if I'm worried about out of control government.. I don't want a government that's trying to just like ram as much through, in as little time, because that's the limited window that they have. Or then trying to claw something back.
The way we do policymaking is so irrational and short-term. We're constantly doing all of this "Get ceiling", gamesmanship... waiting until the last minute to pass a budget because it's all just a game of partisan chicken, which only makes sense when you have this two party hyper-partisan Congress in which the minority party is trying to screw up the majority party so that, that they can take back power in the next election.

Dan: One of the things you talked about in your book was how back in the fifties and sixties, when we passed a lot of meaningful legislation, we also had what you called more of a four- party system that had, you know, conservative Republicans, liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats, liberal Democrats. What happened to winnow that down or what happened to make the parties more singular in ideology and polarized than they were back.

Lee: Well, a lot of things happen and I spend a decent part of the book talking about how the four party system collapsed, but the short version is that politics became much more nationalized, much more focused on culture war issues. And as a result, voters became much more concerned about which party controls Congress. And the parties sorted geographically much more. And it became this sort of reinforcing cycle. What I call a doom loop in which has liberal Republicans became a minority within the Republican party, they had less and less power and the conservative Republicans took over. And the conservative Democrats had less and less power the democratic party liberal Democrats took over and then this became a reinforcing binary.
So we're talking about it's an entrenched two party system for a reason and what it would take to have a a third party emerge. Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, has put forth his Forward Party. And I know you've spoken with him at length. What do you make of that? What's the deal there?

Lee: I don't know. We're still waiting to see. I don't know what the Forward Party is going to be. But I think one thing that Andrew is doing that is important is that he is kind of creating a home for people who are dissatisfied with the two party system and building a movement. And maybe that will go into supporting some candidates. And if it will go into supporting reform My sense is that we're in a moment in which there are a handful of incipient, third parties, and to the extent that they can coordinate and put their differences aside and figure out a way to run some strategic campaigns in a limited number of districts we might be able to see some new representatives in Congress who are neither Democrats, nor Republicans. And that would be, I think that kind of foot in the door to start rethinking our entire party system.
One of the other things I really liked in your book was you sort of laid a blueprint for folks who might be concerned about this and want to push for proportional representation. And the two you cited were the example of New Zealand, where they switched from first pass to post to PR. The second was the direct election of senators. Can you talk a little bit about what happened in those cases and what kind of guidance that might offer people looking to implement it?
So the case of New Zealand is instructive because New Zealand is a country that changed how it does elections. And so, recently less than 30 years ago. And it changed how it did elections that went from the first past the post system to a proportional system because voters were extremely dissatisfied with how the party system was operating.

Lee: And at some point party leaders realized that there was such a gain politically from being pro-reform that they started to endorse it. And there was a national commission. New Zealand did have the advantage of there being a direct ballot initiative, a national referendum, but politicians were, were getting on board with it. Point is that systems can change. I mean electoral system change is rare, but it does happen.
The direct election of senators is another important story because the constitution does not allow senators to be directly elected. It has state legislature's appointing senators. Now you might say, how would that system ever change? Because senators who were elected one way would say, well, I don't, I don't want to change that. And the, the state legislatures might say, well, we don't want to give up our power.
Now, in reality, it was a system that journalists described as corrupt, the public thought was incredibly corrupt and it was also a system that senators didn't like very much because they were beholden to the state legislature. And a lot of them felt like they would rather be independent and not beholden to the state legislature. And also not be able to run independently if they're a party lost control, the state, legislature, and state legislators, didn't like the power all that much because they couldn't run as their own candidates.
They were tied to who they were going to vote for for the us Senate. So it turns out that sometimes we have a system in which nobody really benefits from it. Nobody really likes it very much. But it takes an outside push to change. And I would submit that the system that we have now is a system that nobody likes.
What do members of Congress do all the time? They complain about how often, how awful Congress is and our dysfunctional congresses and what do they do when they retire? They complain about how awful and dysfunctional Congress is. So it's not like anybody's having a great time. It's just, people have inability to imagine things being anything else than they are because the change can sometimes be scary, but you know, it's even scarier not changing in this moment.

Arjun: Lee, you mentioned that there's already legislation introduced to reform some of the way we do voting. I haven't read up as much on it. So maybe for the benefit of all of us and listeners tell us about that legislation. Does it have bi-partisan support? Where is it? What is it trying to accomplish? When might we see some movement there?
it's the Fair Representation Act. It's it's sponsored by representative Don Beyer and has a couple of co-sponsors. honestly, there's not a ton of movement around it right now. And partially because so much of the energy in the democracy reform space in Congress is focused on the Freedom to Vote act, which is, I think an absolutely essential piece of legislation that has much broader support because the idea of like protecting voting rights has been a much more widely socialized and is also much more urgent.

Lee: Although, at least perceived as urgent. And I would argue proportionate representation is equally urgent, but it's, you know, it's an idea that is much more of a challenge to the status quo. So it'll take time to socialize. So that's where things are at, but you know, in the future, I think we might see a broader conversation around proportional representation. Hopefully, Freedom to Vote act will indeed pass. I'm seeing tremendous movement on that and, you know, I think we will see a change to the filibuster sometime in the next month, that will allow that to pass, but maybe I'm overly optimistic.

Dan: It's so difficult to get anything through Congress now. I mean, you know, a great example is like they haven't passed a budget in the last 20 years. And one thing I wonder is would these reforms be better implemented the state level? So, would it be better for sort of state by state organizations to go change their system, to PR and start almost like a feeder system in, at the federal level? Or do you feel again, like it's just too origin. It really needs to be pushed at the federal level as quickly as possible.

Lee: We may not have an opportunity to push it in Washington. So if there are states that want to go ahead and do it for their state legislature, I think that would be great. I mean, like California would be a great state to elected state legislature through proportional representation. And that would certainly shake up the conversation.

Arjun: That'd be pretty interesting. So you mentioned the filibuster and I realized that's probably a rabbit hole of its own, but can you talk to us a little bit about the filibuster? Why do we even have it? Because I think that is another unique bit of to US politics. it certainly isn't there in Canada as far as I remember.

Lee: No, no, it's totally. it's totally. It's totally, weird and bizarre. And

Arjun: Yeah. So what is it, why do we have it?

Lee: I I mean, it's a historical accident that, just sort of persisted and then it became a tool of various groups who didn't want to get rid of it. It's not in the Constitution and the Framers don't talk about it. There's no justification for it. It's just one of these like weird things. It's like a mole on your face that you're become attached to and you don't want to get rid of. yeah, because it like, like you've had it for a while.

Dan: You talked about sort of reducing the power of the Senate. How real is the spirit of having counter majoritarian institutions in the Constitution and how much of that is almost mythology for those that politically benefits?

Lee: The Constitution is a document that was written by a committee of 55 people in the summer of 1787. Most of whom weren't all that involved in the drafting and that, so maybe six or seven people who didn't have any idea of what the country would become. And said, lots of contradictory things both at the time and following that moment. They changed their views, they learned, and they were smart, intelligent people. And the constitution itself has proved remarkably resilient, but largely it's resilient because it's very hard to amend. And so had it not been hard to amend, I think it would have been amended a lot more. Then we might not have the same reverence for it had it been easier to amend.

Arjun: So I want to switch gears a little bit. I saw this, I think was a tweet from you Lee, or maybe you retweeted someone where you had this graph.

Lee:who knows?

Arjun: Yeah, there was this graph that you showed of how left leaning parties have over time, swapped out support of the working class for the support of the educated class. And this was true in several Western democracies. Do you remember what I'm talking?

Lee: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that trend is real.

Arjun: Why is that? Why, why is this happening everywhere , with a Western democracies?

Lee: The short reason for that is. One, that people have become a lot more educated than they used to. So there's a lot more educated voters for Democrats to are the party of the left to grab. Two, is that educated voters have largely flocked to cities, which are been the hubs of, of the information global economy and which also tend to be the homes of the left parties.

Arjun: The thing that I was wondering is, is some of this inevitable as living standards rise. And so as living standards rise, we sort of have more luxuries, more ability to, I don't know, have different political views and maybe when living standards are really low and perhaps then it's just trying to survive, just trying to make ends meet. And maybe some of these liberal ideas are perhaps less popular with that group. I'm clearly not a political scientist, but maybe that makes sense of what I'm trying to say there.

Lee: So, I think what you're getting at is this idea that as people have more individual and personal freedom, they tend to take on more cosmopolitan views and more more sort of broadly liberal views and tolerant views. Whereas folks who are in a kind of a scarcity mind set are, are less likely to take on cosmopolitan liberal views. And they're just more concerned about their own wellbeing.
Which is broadly true. And I think broadly explains the general expansion of democracy around the world. Is that as people have kind of more education, more financial independence, more ability to think beyond their immediate needs, they tend to become more supportive of liberal democracy. So to the extent that there are folks in the U S who are struggling, you know, maybe they're less supportive of liberal democracy. However, a lot of supporters of the Republican party are not so much struggling as they are old.

Arjun: Hmm.

Lee: and, and feel left behind by the times.

Arjun: I think you answered everything that I had. I was just going down the list. I think you nailed it. So I don't want to belabor the point, but this was fantastic. Thank you, Lee very much.

Lee: Oh, all right. Well, thank you. And I appreciate you having me on, on the program.
Do you want to keep listening?

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