This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: We’re going to have a discussion that’s about democracy, but a little broader than the day-to-day news. And the guests are two political scientists. Lee Drutman is with the New America Foundation, and Mark Copelovitch is at the University of Wisconsin. Lee has done a lot of great work on parties and political reform, and Mark specializes in international political economy. He’s written about Europe and the political parties there, but also does some comparative work comparing what’s happening in the U.S. to what’s happening abroad. So guys, thank you. Welcome.
Mark Copelovitch: Thanks for having us.
Lee Drutman: Yeah. Excited to be having this conversation. Couldn’t be more timely.
Bacon: So I’m going to start with Mark, and I want to talk about—we’re going to define the problem first. And for a lot of New Republic listeners, the problem is the Republican Party—and I think that to some extent as well. But I think we want to get a little bit beyond this. One thing Mark talks about a lot on Bluesky—Mark has a great Bluesky feed, check him out there—is the problem of presidentialism. And explain to people—right now the presidency being a problem seems intuitive if you think about Donald Trump, maybe. But also Britain has a prime minister, and things are not going perfectly there right now either. So explain to me, from a political science perspective, why presidential systems are inherently problematic for democracies.
Copelovitch: Yes. My thoughts on this come from a classic article from Juan Linz, who was a scholar of Latin American politics and authoritarianism. He wrote an article back in the 1990s called The Perils of Presidentialism. And one of the core ideas of it is that presidential systems make it difficult to hold the executive accountable in ways that parliamentary systems don’t.
So you have the separation of powers, and in the U.S. we’re raised as Americans to believe that the branches of government and the separation of powers are good. But one of the things that Linz talked about with presidentialism is it makes it very difficult to remove the chief executive when laws are being broken, crimes are being committed, et cetera. And it creates dual and unresolvable claims to legitimacy.
So if you think about a parliamentary system, you vote—it’s usually proportional representation of some form. The prime minister is within the parliament, and this is what we’re seeing in Britain right now: the main party in government can remove the prime minister.
There can be a vote of confidence, which is usually a simple majority vote, where the coalition says, We no longer support the prime minister, and either there are new elections or you choose a new prime minister. It happens very quickly, and as we’ve seen in Britain, it can happen often—and it can happen for any number of reasons.
The problem in the U.S.—what we’re seeing with Trump—is the only mechanism for removing a president is either the next election or an extraordinary measure that the founders created called impeachment, which has never been successfully used in the entire history of the United States government. And when you directly elect a president, you have these dual claims of loyalty.
In a parliamentary system, you can claim the parliament represents the will of the people, and the prime minister is the leader of the government, but people voted for parties in parliament. When you have a presidential system, people vote for the parliament, but they also directly vote for the president. So the president—and you see this with far-right and nationalist and populist leaders often—they’re representing the people more authentically than the legislature.
So those are the core insights from Linz. And I study international relations and comparative politics, and I think that a lot of what we’re seeing in the United States is the problem of having a presidential system. And even more than that, in the United States, both parties since World War II have really delegated more and more power from Congress to the president, so you have governance by executive order. And we currently really don’t have a functioning Congress. We have extreme presidentialism right now, and the problem of a seeming inability to remove a leader who clearly is breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
Bacon: So Lee, I’m going to ask about the problem you write about a lot, which is—you’ve used this phrase, “the two-party doom loop.” So the question I’m going to ask you is: is a two-party system inherently problematic, or is the way the U.S.’ two-party system has evolved particularly problematic?
Drutman: The way that the U.S. two-party system has evolved is particularly problematic. Now, it’s interesting—Linz wrote that article, “Perils of Presidentialism,” in 1990, and in that article he struggles with the U.S., because he says the U.S. is actually a presidential system and it’s pretty stable. And he says the reason the U.S. is stable as a presidential system is because you have two parties that are basically centrist. So there’s not any real contestation over the direction of policy in the U.S., so you can have a presidential system with a two-party system that is very center-oriented, and that’s probably okay.
Now, it’s interesting—if we talk about presidentialism and PR, there are a lot of Latin American countries that have actually done this pretty successfully for the last three decades. Linz is writing in 1990. Scott Mainwaring, who’s an esteemed comparativist, writes an article in 1993 saying multipartyism and presidentialism is the difficult combination.
Now, interestingly, Scott Mainwaring and I wrote a piece a few years ago in which we looked at the evidence for the last 30 years of Latin American PR plus presidentialism, and Scott changed his views. He actually—PR and presidentialism can work okay under certain conditions. A number of Latin American countries have actually worked reasonably well. And we talk a lot about the decline of democracy, but actually there are a number of pretty successful cases in Latin America over the last 30 years.
So during this period, the U.S. two-party system, which had been very center-oriented for a long time, starts to pull apart. Now, I actually think the way to think about that pulling apart is a collapse of dimensionality—that what we had in the U.S., though we called it a two-party system, was really a multi-party system that was within the two-party system. We had liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. We had liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. So something more akin to a four-party system in which you could make different coalitions across different issues. And we divided government for a long time, which was coalition government.
Starting in the 1990s, what happens is the collapse of dimensionality and the pulling apart of those two-party coalitions—a lot of reasons for that, that we could go into. But basically, the problem is that you can maintain a two-party system when the two parties are broadly overlapping and there’s not a real difference between which party gets into power. But as the parties pull apart and elections become narrow and existential and zero-sum, that system breaks down.
A fundamental principle of democracy is that it’s a system in which parties can lose elections. And if you feel like you’re going to have another chance in power someday, and the rules are not going to totally change and shut you out of power if you lose, or your vision of the country is not going to be fundamentally upset if you’re out of power—then it’s an okay system.
If you think that if you lose everything, and the other side is going to try to permanently oppress you—which is what so many people seem to believe in this country, and there’s some evidence to suggest that the current party in power is trying to do that—that makes it hard to have a democracy. You have to believe in the legitimacy of elections. And when that breaks apart, you don’t have a democracy anymore. And that’s the situation that we’re in.
So can a two-party system work? Yes, under certain narrow conditions. However, there was a lot that was left out in that bipartisan compromise. In the 1950s, a lot of political scientists are writing about how the two-party system is just a muddle, and that a lot of the issues that America needs to be dealing with—civil rights, a very important issue—is pushed to the side in order to maintain that bipartisan compromise. And arguably, it is the elevation of voting rights and civil rights in the 1960s that starts to break apart that compromise and create a slow sorting.
It almost feels like in a two-party system, you can either have a broad bipartisan compromise that leaves a lot of people out, or you can have a two-party competition which just creates an existential power struggle—neither of which is great. One of which doesn’t lead to violence at a national level, or leads to subnational violence—you create a lot of subnational authoritarianism in the U.S.
Bacon: So let me zone in on what you’ve written about as the solution, Lee. You’ve written about proportional representation and the idea of multi-member districts. Explain to people what that means specifically.
So I live in Kentucky—just break it down. I live in Kentucky. We have six members of Congress. They’re dispersed around the state—there’s one in Louisville, there’s one in Lexington, and four in the other parts of the state. So we have six members of Congress in our current system: five Republicans and one Democrat. Explain how proportional representation and multi-member districts would look from that perspective.
Drutman: And what percentage of Kentucky voted for Kamala Harris in the last election?
Bacon: Let’s say it’s 35 Harris, 65 Trump. Something like that.
Drutman: Yeah. Okay. So Kentucky would be roughly two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat. So in a proportional system, that would be two Democrats and four Republicans. But because of the way that the district lines are drawn, Democrats are all pushed into one district, more or less—one safe district for Democrats and five safe districts for Republicans.
Now, what makes that possible? The fact that there are a bunch of different lines that you can draw. Now, imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.
So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.
And in some ways, it’s the simpler system. When we think of single-member districts as simple, it’s really incredibly complicated the way all these lines constantly get redrawn. And what it also means is that all the votes matter. You get to vote for candidates that are going to go to Congress, so you’re actually helping to elect somebody who represents you.
And maybe there’s actually more than two parties, because there are probably two or three Democratic parties and two or three Republican parties that could run candidates. So rather than having these fights that we’re having within Democratic primaries, or Republicans having within their own primaries—progressives should be their own party. They should be able to run separately from the more classical liberal Democrats, the more business Democrats. Maybe some populist Democrats might run in a separate party.
And they can come together and form a coalition as the Democratic coalition. But right now, I think a lot of people don’t know what the Democratic Party stands for, or who the Democratic Party is. They have ideas of what the Democratic Party should be, but they can’t really vote for those candidates who really reflect their idea of what the Democratic coalition should be.
Whereas if you had a proportional system where, instead of needing to get 51 percent, in a six-member district roughly 16 percent—that would allow two different types of Democrats, or the Democratic coalition, and it would allow different types of Republicans. There are some more moderate, traditional liberal Republicans who don’t have any representation in Congress. I don’t know how many of them are left in Kentucky, but I think there is still some portion of the electorate that is non-MAGA but Republican—doesn’t like the direction of the Republican Party, not Democrats—but might support a more classical Republican Party.
Bacon: Let me ask. Okay—Italy, France, Israel—there are countries that have multi-party systems and, I think, proportional representation, and they’re not all governed perfectly. Why is this inherently better than our current two-party doom loop? Is more parties necessarily better?
Drutman: It is, up to a limit. Now, France is a presidential—well—presidential system. So to Mark’s point about presidentialism. Also, France is not a proportional system. It is a majoritarian, single-member-district system. They use a two-round system which allows for multiple parties.
Bacon: Oh, yes. Sorry.
Drutman: But yes, they have multiple parties. Italy—somehow they muddle through. The Italians have an incredibly complicated system that goes back—yeah, like every election they’re changing it, it’s more majoritarian, it’s less majoritarian. And yet somehow they muddle through.
Giorgia Meloni came to power under this system. She started out as an extremist, but because she had to form a coalition with the center-right party, run independently, she had to moderate. And as she’s stepped up to be a leader, in order to maintain her coalition, she’s had to be a little bit more statesperson-like.
And I think that is one of the arguments—that in a PR system, you can have these far-right parties. Either they get shut out of the government coalition entirely—which has been the case in a number of countries, the AfD in Germany being probably the most well-known example to Americans.
They did pretty well in the last election, but no party is going to form a government with them because they’re too extreme. Now, they are trying to figure out how to become a little bit more mainstream. If they do better, they will—but they will still need the CSU-CDU alliance to form a governing coalition.
Right now in Denmark, there are coalition talks—the right parties may form a coalition. And there’s an immigrant [skeptic] party in Denmark, as there are in many European countries, but they will need to form a coalition with a more center-oriented party if they’re going to form a government.
Bacon: Let me interrupt. There are two points you’re making. One is that if you have more than two parties, you don’t have the sort of existential fight over it. And the second is that if you have to get a majority coalition, you’re going to have to be more moderate—you can’t just win on 25 percent in the primary and then win it all. Is that the basic idea—those two ideas in one sense?
Drutman: And you’re seeing the version of this in the UK right now, where the Reform Party—which is about 27, 30 percent in current polls—could win a majority in parliament in the next election because the UK has a first-past-the-post system.
And it’s worth hanging on Israel for a second, because people will say, Oh, what about Israel? Two things about Israel. One is that Israel has an extreme form of proportional representation, with closed list, and the entire Knesset is one electoral district with a threshold of 3.25 percent.
So that creates a lot of parties. Nobody who’s advocating proportional representation in the U.S. would ever say, We should do the Italian system, or We should do the Israeli system. Those are not the systems that people propose. People are saying, We should look at the German system, or We should look at the Swedish system, or We should look at the Danish system—or some version of that. Those are the better systems.
But of course, if Israel were a two-party system, you could see what the civil war would be like between the liberals and the—you’re already seeing a version of that. And arguably, because there are too many parties, that fragmentation actually congeals more directly into a two-bloc system. Although Israel did experiment with having a separately elected prime minister for one or two elections, I believe, and then they got rid of it. Also, they don’t have a constitution.
Bacon: All right. Let me go to Mark and ask—I assume you agree that proportional representation is a good idea?
Copelovitch: Yes. Yeah, I just wanted to jump in and say there are poorly and well-designed proportional systems. Lee mentioned Germany—the German system is the sort of thing you would think about, with a five percent threshold. You don’t get in if you get fewer than five percent of the vote, so you end up with five or six parties.
Lee mentioned that you could think about the U.S. as having two parties that were really four parties. Germany basically has a two-party system which is six parties. You have the far-right AfD, you have the Christian Democrats, and you have the Free Democrats—who are a low-tax, libertarian, deregulation-type party that’s progressive on social issues. The Adam Smith party, if you want. And then on the left, you have the traditional Social Democrats, the Greens, and now Die Linke, which is the sort of progressive far-left party. Roughly they’re each getting 50 percent of the vote—but the AfD is getting a quarter.
And I’ve said for a long time—you’ve seen me say this on Bluesky—basically the U.S. and Germany have the same distribution of voters in different systems. And the dominant German government for the last 30, 40 years has been a grand coalition of the center-left and center-right—the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.
If we had what Lee is talking about, which is what I think we should do, we would have ended up in 2016 with a Clinton-Romney grand coalition government. So yeah, you can look at Italy and Israel, and people always bring those up and think PR is bad—but those are badly designed proportional representation systems, in the same way that we have a badly designed presidential system.
Bacon: Let me ask you: what other—we’re talking about reforms we think are ideal. If you had to say, Essential reforms we have to have—PR is one. Is it Supreme Court changes? Campaign finance? What else? If you had to say “we have to do these three things”—PR is one—what are the other two you’d say are essential in the short term?
Copelovitch: So I think about it as there are three big problems. The most immediate thing is we have a completely runaway Supreme Court, which has become a nine-member super-legislature and no longer follows the law or the Constitution. So the most immediate thing is we need to add seats to the Supreme Court and significantly rein in the shadow docket and its powers.
The second is these institutional, legislative, and electoral reforms to have multi-party democracy. I’m very much with Lee—and Lee is the expert on this—in terms of PR plus multi-member districts. I think we should enlarge the House, add states in the Senate—those sorts of things.
The third is the runaway imperial executive. In the area where I see this most—I study international political economy—is on trade policy and tariffs. Both parties from World War II onward delegated more and more power to the president on trade and on other issues.
But they also wrote in these Cold War laws in the 1960s and ‘70s that basically have clauses where the president can invoke a national emergency and then has almost imperial power to do whatever. And no one imagined that a president would abuse it the way Trump is abusing it. That’s the IEEPA, and you hear about Section 232 or Section 122 of the obscure trade laws from the ‘60s and ‘70s. So you basically need to rewrite and rein all of those in.
We have a presidential system. We’re going to continue to have a presidential system. But you can’t have an imperial presidency. Lee talked about the party overlap—the idea of the imperial presidency was predicated on two overlapping parties where stuff had to get done in a big country that’s the global superpower, and sometimes you can’t wait for Congress and the president needs to move relatively quickly.
But now we’re in a world where effectively we have a pro-democracy center-left party and a far-right party. And all these things that you just didn’t do—it turns out they were norms. The president could invoke all these national security clauses, but he never did.
So for me, the order is: nothing is going to get done until the Supreme Court is fixed and reined in. Then you need the multi-party proportional democracy reforms. But alongside that, we’re still going to have a presidential system, and you can’t have the imperial presidency. Maybe one day, if we go back to a world where the parties overlap and everybody is moderate and pro-democracy.
But in the current context and the foreseeable future, you just can’t have those imperial-presidency laws, because Trump has basically shown that they’re giant loopholes—they’re basically get-out-of-jail-free cards. You can invoke them, and then he pretty much can do anything, and Congress can’t stop him.
Bacon: Let me ask Lee then asking another question—what would your three be? PR is one, and then are there two others, or is PR just the thing we need to focus on right now?
Drutman: I would say PR plus fusion voting for the single-winner offices. Now, fusion voting is where multiple parties can endorse the same candidate. New York has had it for a long time. In the 2024 presidential election, you could vote for Kamala Harris on the Democratic line or on the Working Families Party line. And the Working Families Party is a vibrant third party in New York.
Mostly they endorse the Democrats, but they organize, they do the things that a party is supposed to do. And actually, we just put out a great paper at New America on the Working Families Party as an associational party, by Tabatha Abu El-Haj, who’s a great election law scholar of parties. And they’re doing the things that parties should do.
Bacon: Let me drill down. What you mean is: for Senate, governor, president—things where you can only elect one person—you should be able to choose the party by which you’re voting for the person, which again communicates there’s a difference between a progressive Democrat and a moderate one, even if they’re both voting for Harris, right?
Drutman: Exactly. So you say, I want Harris to know that progressives support her, and 20 percent of her share is coming from progressives. And in a lot of presidential PR systems, what you effectively have is pre-electoral coalitions—parties come together to agree on the same presidential candidate, and they often signal the coalition that they would like to have.
I think this is a way to do that—it’s a way to keep the smaller parties active in the single-winner election. So I think that combination is actually really important. If you just do multi-party elections for the House and then not for the Senate, you lose some of the benefits of multipartyism. And having it for the president would be great.
I agree with Mark—we should think about ways to deal with the Supreme Court. Some of it could just be limiting what the Supreme Court is going to rule on and creating supermajority standards for overruling legislation. An idea I like is judicial sortition—that all of the associate justices get randomly selected to be a nine-member, or maybe it should be a 15-member, court each term.
So you don’t know what the court is going to look like, so you don’t bring litigation. And then each court selects the docket for future courts, so they don’t know what the court is going to look like. I think that would create an element of randomness that would stop some of the litigation and would bring a diversity of views to each term.
I think the disproportionality of the Senate is a big issue. That’s a harder thing to deal with. You can add some states if you want to play political hardball. Think about ways to maybe make the Senate a little less powerful. Again, Germany did something interesting—they had basically a deal where their upper chamber, the [Bundesrat], had fewer things in its jurisdiction, in exchange for giving the states in Germany—Germany is also a federal system—a little bit more autonomy.
I think we could think about some way to clarify some roles of federalism by giving states more autonomy on certain, particularly fiscal, issues and maybe limit some of the role of the Senate. Ideally, the Senate maybe should just do foreign policy, mostly. But that, again, is a big thing.
I do think we need to tackle campaign finance, and I think it should be public funding for political parties in a multi-party system.
I think we’re at a moment—and I’ve been hearing this from a lot of different people—after Callais, I think a lot of people realize that this is really a moment for a new reconstruction of American democracy. The old system is dead. It’s broken down, and everything’s on fire. But at some point there will be a clear landscape to build something new. And it could come as early as 2029. This is really a moment for a wide scoping of: what is the promise of American democracy, and how do we make that real?
Copelovitch: Definitely. It feels like something has shifted—that we’re having this conversation, and people are not saying, Oh, you’re extreme outliers to be considering these things anymore. It feels very different than, say, 2020 or 2021 where we are now.
Bacon: So now we’ve got half an hour in. I’m glad we laid out these solutions. Now I get to the part I think about the most, which is: how do we get these—these are big ideas, changing how Congress works, changing how the presidency works.
My inclination is that a Democratic Party trifecta is more likely to do these things than a Republican trifecta, as we can discuss. But I think that’s probably the best chance we have to do this stuff—in 2029, if the Democrats control the Senate, the House, and the presidency, there’s some chance they might try some of this big stuff you guys are talking about.
But to get there, we’re about to have a national presidential campaign, a Democratic primary, where 15, 20 people might run. This could be the time for a big national conversation about big ideas—but maybe it’s not. So I want to ask, starting with Mark and then going to Lee: do we want Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris or Josh Shapiro or Andy Beshear or anybody else—do we want them to talk about these kinds of reforms on the campaign trail in the next year?
The positive would be obviously: running for president is about talking about ideas and what you do as president, so of course they need to talk about this. The other argument would be: one, having the Democratic candidates talk about these ideas might polarize them, make them more “political” and partisan, and might make Republicans and independents even more resistant to them.
And two, it might be that voters don’t care about these ideas—because we always hear voters care about the economy—so a candidate running on democracy or these reform ideas is asking to lose. And so we might want to hope the person runs on affordability and then does these reforms in 2029. Talk about that—do you want the candidates out there discussing these kinds of issues next year?
Copelovitch: I do, and I think it’s essential. The big cleavage in the Democratic Party right now is this—and you can think about it as fight or not, or you can think about it as kitchen-table issues versus democracy.
But look, the way I think about it is: I’m old enough to remember the George W. Bush administration, and then Obama winning, and then Trump getting elected, and then Biden. And the way I think about it is we’ve run the experiment twice—that the Republican Party is going to moderate, and we’re going to get through these problems. I don’t think it’s polarization—I think one party has become a far-right party. And we’re going to get through these problems by the Democrats governing well and fixing the economy?
Obama spends all his political capital on healthcare—hugely important issue, but there was nothing left in terms of political capital on any institutional reform. Biden spends all his political capital on fixing the economy. Doesn’t get credit for it—fixed the economy better than any other country in the world in the wake of COVID. No political capital or interest in doing the institutional reform.
So for me, it’s: we know the outcome, which is you don’t get rewarded for just governing well and focusing on affordability or kitchen-table issues. And meanwhile, the Republican Party has gone further and further right. Whatever overlap we still had between the two parties clearly no longer exists anymore. You can see that with Callais, you can see that with everything else going on with Trump.
And I also think, in standard American politics, you basically have time before the midterms with the trifecta to do one thing and do it well. So if the Democrats don’t do it right away—and it’s not ready to go, and they haven’t laid the groundwork on the campaign trail for this is why the institutions are broken, and here are the big reforms—I also think all of the policy issues that people care about follow from fixing the institutions. And I don’t know how to convey that to people—I try to do that as a teacher and political scientist.
But if we had multi-party democracy and we had either a Clinton-Romney coalition, or a sort of center-left multi-party coalition that looked like the Greens and Social Democrats in Germany or something like that, you would get the policies on abortion and climate and funding education—pick your issue that you think is important.
Basically, the policies that Bernie Sanders supports are closer to what 70 percent of Americans want than the policies that Donald Trump supports, and we have institutions that don’t reflect that. So if you fix the institutions, people are going to get the policies that they want. If you keep trying to ram the policies through the current anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic institutions, the Democrats will fail, and then people will punish them electorally again.
Bacon: Let me follow up and push you a little bit here. Cory Booker is literally already running on exempting a large number of people from paying taxes. Chris Van Hollen is doing a similar plan. I assume JD Vance will have a plan like that too.
So Andy Beshear comes in and talks to us, and he says—and Mark, you say to him—Andy Beshear says, These guys are running on reducing taxes drastically for human beings in America, putting money in their pockets, and you want me to run on proportional representation. Are you asking me to lose? How is that going to be a viable plan? Talk about that.
Copelovitch: Look, I’m not a politician, so I don’t know how you sell it. But the problem with the Beshear view or the Booker view is it reminds me of the first Democratic primary debate in 2020. If you go back and remember that, everybody went down the line and talked about their perfect universal healthcare plan that they were going to pass, with no discussion of the fact that they were all dead on arrival in the Senate—even if the Democrats controlled the Senate.
So Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen, and maybe Andy Beshear, are going to promise people a European social-democratic welfare state, and also promise that half of the households in the country are never going to pay income tax. And also tell people that the debt is too high, because we’re now at 100 percent debt to GDP. And I could give you my international political economy argument of why that’s irrelevant, but I won’t now.
But you’re actually setting yourself up as Democrats for a recipe for failure and a political backlash, because you can’t get these policies through the institutions. And if you could, we can’t pay for them. And everybody’s then going to be upset that you promised them the moon and you can’t deliver.
So I don’t know how to sell the institutions, but all it does is set the Democrats up for further electoral disappointment down the line—either we can’t get the stuff done, or people say we can’t afford it.
And I think Obama and Biden made this mistake—the Bush tax cuts can be rolled back, but only for people who make more than $400,000 or $250,000, and—
Bacon: I didn’t mean to bring us into the tax part. That was not the question. The question was the proposed—I agree, those tax plans are not great. Lee, but I think—
Copelovitch: It fits in. Which is: it’s not just can we get the policies through the institutions, it’s also that all the things that are kitchen-table issues that we say we want to do something about—you have to convince Americans that we’re going to be able to pay for them. So I do think it’s a double whammy.
Bacon: Lee, talk about my question—do you want to hear the candidates talk about these kinds of reforms? Should they be talking about these kinds of reforms on the trail next year?
Drutman: Yes, but they should talk about them as part of a story. Politics is about storytelling. It’s not about a bullet point of “what I’m going to do for you.” Here’s my policy on this, here’s my policy on this. Nobody cares about your policy plans.
People didn’t get excited about Barack Obama because of healthcare policies. They got excited about Barack Obama because of who he was and the story he told about America. It was a story of uplift, it was a story of hope, it was a story of change. These are the universal themes of successful political campaigns—you tell a story.
It’s classic storytelling, right? We’re in the middle of the story. This is the point at which all hope feels lost, and now here’s the story of uplift. The story of uplift is: the promise of American democracy is great. We have fallen down on that. It has been corrupted by evil Trump people, by greedy corporations, tech oligarchs, by corrupt politicians. When I become president, we’re going to end the gerrymandering wars. We’re going to make American democracy responsive to its promise. We’re going to give people a reason to vote. We’re going to make elections matter. We’re going to make your voice matter. And then the list of policy solutions fits into that story.
But I really am so confused by this view that has taken over a lot of smart folks in Democratic politics, which is, Oh, we’re just going to have a checklist of poll-tested policy positions that don’t fit as part of a story. What is the story of we’re going to give this tax cut to this group that they’re not going to notice? The—like the Biden—Oh, we’re going to do all these programs.
Bacon:. Let me stop you there to ask, though. There are—Zohran Mamdani told a story—but the story was about affordability. So I agree that you should not go on stage and read your policy plan. But let’s assume there are two people telling a story. One is telling a story about affordability, and one is telling a story about these reforms—about democracy. That does seem to be challenging for the person doing a story about reforms, I would say.
Copelovitch: The story about reforms, though, isn’t “here’s reforms.”
Bacon: I’m agreeing that you should not list the—let’s move past me.
Copelovitch: The story about reforms is corruption and what they—and look, if you want to go down the list of candidates, the guy who’s doing this is Ossoff. When you see Ossoff speak, it’s what Lee was saying: the system is corrupt, it doesn’t represent you.
And there are crimes being committed, and people need to be held accountable. So yeah, you need a story about the institutional reforms, but they’re not mutually exclusive.
The system is corrupt, and you can do the populism thing also about regular people getting ripped off and all the policies are bad. But—it’s not just say, Here’s why proportional representation and fusion voting are good. It’s in the context of: the things we think American democracy is supposed to represent are not being represented anymore.
Bacon: Let me follow up and ask, though. A campaign is about going to Iowa, but it’s also about talking to editorial boards, talking to people like me. Should Andy Beshear, on his website, have Here is my plan for proportional representation—or not? Because at some point, you’re going to have to release some ideas. We don’t have to talk about them on the stump, but should the ideas be out there in some way?
Copelovitch: Yes.
Drutman: Yes.
Copelovitch: And my view is yes. You said people don’t understand this and they’re not demanding it, but people don’t follow politics closely—they respond to what’s put out there. As a political scientist, my view is people don’t understand these things, but they would if politicians talked about them. It’s not—I give the average voter a lot more credit than I think a lot of politicians do.
You could talk about Supreme Court reform—Callais makes that really easy now. The gerrymandering thing—and we’re back to Jim Crow—makes all the stuff about PR much easier to talk about now. And Trump running amok on policies with war and trade makes reining in the executive—it feels a lot easier to make that case now.
And I think, yes, on your website, if you’re a politician and you’re running for president now as a Democrat, it can’t just be the checklist of policies, like Lee was saying. It also needs to be, And here’s how we’re going to fix this stuff, which is going to require changing things in ways that we as Americans have been uncomfortable with for the last 50 years.
The other thing about modern American politics is—and I don’t know how we got here—we changed our institutions all the time until about the 1950s. We added states all the time. We changed how voting happened all the time. We delegated trade authority from Congress to the president—we did all these things all the time.
And we got at some point in my lifetime as an adult into this idea that the institutions are cast in amber and we can’t change them anymore, which is the most ahistorical part of the whole American democratic experiment. We used to do this stuff all the time. We should be able to do it again.
Bacon: Yeah. Go ahead. Lee—what about the polarization thing? If having the Democratic candidates talk about here are my ideas, or if in some way it’s clear that proportional representation has become a Democratic idea, advanced by Democratic candidates—does that make it harder to convince the rest of the country that it’s a good idea for the country?
Drutman: It depends how you talk about it, to some extent. You can talk about it as this is the thing to keep Democrats in power, or this is the thing to end the gerrymandering wars. And if you say, Americans are sick and tired of the gerrymandering wars, Americans are sick and tired of the two-party system, Americans want more options—then that’s a way to sell it more universally.
And any issue that becomes prominent in American politics is going to be polarized, because we are in a hyper-polarized time. The only issues that are unpolarized are the issues that nobody talks about. There’s a secret Congress where you can do bipartisan stuff if you want to do something that nobody in The New Republic is ever going to write about—a very niche issue.
If you want to fix something on copyright for songs on streaming services—yeah, sure, you can do that, that can be bipartisan. But as soon as you talk about something like how we do elections in this country, that’s going to be partisan.
Now, there’s a way in which you can talk about this as: it is good for people who don’t feel represented by the current Republican Party, even though they’re not Democrats. You might not support this because it seems like a Democratic issue, but it could be a 60, 70 percent issue. And all Republicans in Congress vote against it because, of course, they have to.
But then it changes the rules, and some of them could actually run under this system as the type of Republican that I think they thought they were going to be when they got into politics before Trump took all the energy.
You can imagine John Thune running as a different type of Republican. You can imagine a bunch of Republicans who have lost in the last several cycles running as different types of Republicans under a system in which they can run as a center-right party. Right now, there’s one path to get elected as a Republican, and that’s kissing the Trump ring.
Copelovitch: There’s a Cheney-Kinzinger party that gets 15 percent of the vote or something like that and is part of a coalition government.
Bacon: So the last question is: let’s imagine a scenario—Democrats win the House, Democrats win the Senate, Democrats win the presidency. They can do some kind of political reform bill. Politicians don’t tend to want to take away their power, and what we are calling for in a certain sense is: the Democratic Party should win an election, win all these states, spend all this money, and then come into power and create new parties to disempower itself, functionally—to give Americans more choices, to imply that the Democratic Party is somehow not properly governing the country, and therefore we should give other parties a chance. I’m having a hard time imagining the current Democratic Party House members—I know some of these people—doing that. So is that fanciful, or do you—that would require a level of patriotism that I would love to see but I’m skeptical of. Reassure me that these people can do that.
Drutman: There’s the simple self-interested argument that you can make to Democrats, which is basically: the cost of ruling—if you win the trifecta in 2029, the cost of ruling is going to come at you hard and fast. You will lose the midterms, because every party in power loses the midterms. You can’t solve the affordability crisis with enough force and energy to actually make a difference. And people are mostly voting for Democrats in the current elections because they’re anti-MAGA, not because they are pro-Democrat. So Democrats will lose, and then the Republicans will rewrite all the maps in the census year, and things will get a lot worse. So that’s one argument.
But also—do elected Democrats want to be in this world of perpetual redistricting? Do they want to be in this world of perpetual gerrymandering? And do they think of themselves as Democrats, or would they rather think of themselves as progressives or moderates?
There are a lot of factions within the party that are warring against each other. Wouldn’t you rather, if you’re a moderate Democrat, say, Look, I’m the moderate Democrat. You want the crazy communist lefties? Go vote for them, join their party. Or the progressive Democrats say, I’m progressive. You want the corporate Democrats? Go vote for them. We’re different parties, and we can work together, but we want to empower you, the voters.
Members of Congress like being in Congress—although increasingly they don’t, even though they go. There’s going to be a lot of turnover in Congress. A lot of people are retiring. And the idea that you represent a meaningful constituency in an age of perpetual redistricting is just harder and harder to sell.
Sure, any reform takes power. But if I’m Hakeem Jeffries, the sell I’d make to him would be: Look, you preside over a coalition, and you can hold together that coalition for two years at best under the current system. You might be part of a coalition that has power longer if you allow the different pieces of the coalition to run independently. And you support a reform that Americans would be super enthusiastic for, because Americans have been screaming in every single poll. Do you want more parties? Yes—70 percent. Do you think the system needs fundamental change? 80 percent.
Copelovitch: Yeah. I’d also go back, Perry, to something Lee said before. He brought up Adam Przeworski’s—a scholar from NYU—classic definition of democracy: a system in which parties lose elections. And the thing that you’re bringing up—that we fear designing ourselves out of office—is predicated on all parties believing in losing elections, and that regular democracy is going to continue into the future.
And it feels different now. We’re in a moment where we’re watching [a return] to Jim Crow, and the Republicans are trying to tilt the playing field to the point that they might be in power—nobody’s in power forever—but basically all the time. And so it just feels to me, again, there’s a moment now where more people realize that politics-as-usual—we don’t want to consider any of these institutional reforms because that’s how politics works, as you were describing it—that’s going to be hard to change for sitting elected politicians.
But if you do think, for the party in the medium term, what would it mean for the Democrats to be in government in coalition and get the policies that the party claims it wants? It’s actually a rational calculation to think about institutional reforms, even if that means in the next election, instead of winning 52 percent of the vote, you might win 33 percent of the vote. The policies that are part of the party platform that you say you’ve been fighting for forever—you would accomplish them in a coalition government. I don’t think that’s going to appeal to every politician. But—
Drutman: But who’s the “you” in that statement? Because what is a party? It’s a label and a collectivity—but it’s a bunch of individual politicians and groups and voters who might—what, the 33 percent? It’s not that the Democratic coalition will get 33 percent. It’s that the Democratic coalition might actually get more votes, because they could actually expand if they add more parties to that coalition.
Copelovitch: This is where I think the German analogy is very good again. You could imagine the three parties that replace the Democrats might actually get more votes than the single Democratic Party—
Drutman: I’m sure they would. And they could build a supermajority coalition under certain circumstances. And again, there are a lot of these policies that are 65 percent policies. But we have a system in which a minority that is well-placed as a plurality of a plurality can get total control over our government, which is a real flaw in our system.
Copelovitch: And a nine-member super-legislature that can veto what makes it through the other two legislatures.
Bacon: And speaking of that—do we know what Samuel Alito’s views on proportional representation are? Do we know what his views are on multi-party democracy? Is it possible we pass this reform and they immediately strike it down? Lee, you’ve been studying this more—is that a possibility?
Drutman: It’s possible. I spent a lot of time advocating for proportional representation, and I will say, in the wake of the Callais decision, this is the first time that anybody has ever suggested that proportional representation would get struck down by the court. So yes, you can draw some—I don’t know what the argument would be. It’s not an argument that any election law person has ever raised. But you can’t rule out anything—
Copelovitch: I do think the sequencing thing is important, though. That’s why we were talking earlier—I think fixing the Supreme Court has to be right away. For precisely this reason: if we’re at the point of speculating that institutional reforms passed through Congress might be overruled by the Supreme Court, then we have a massive problem of separation of powers and a runaway institution.
Drutman: You have a voting rights law that was on the books for a long time, and all of a sudden that’s unconstitutional. The U.S. Congress has been regulating—using its Article I, Section 4 powers to regulate how it does elections—for the entire history of the republic. And is Congress now going to say that it doesn’t have that power anymore? And come up with some cockamamie reading of Article I, Section 4 that it only applies to such and such because such and such originalist theory thought only white men could vote—and therefore, to be truly originalist, only propertied white men over the age of 25 should vote, because that’s the true originalist view? Is that where we’re going with it? I don’t know.
I agree there are a lot of reasons to do Supreme Court reform. The court has basically disqualified itself from the role of being the Supreme Court, in my opinion—and I think the opinion of a lot of folks. And I think this is something that is a real live question among the people who will have the pen in 2029. I think presidential candidates should talk about it. I think some ideas are better than others.
But this is a moment that we’re in—these next few years—in which there’s going to be a lot of space for exploring what the reconstruction of American politics should look like. And I think it needs to be comprehensive. You get one chance to do this, and if you don’t do it right, it’s 20 years of misery.
Copelovitch: Yeah. And again, I would say, as we were talking about before, and as a political economy scholar—this is not mutually exclusive with the kitchen-table and affordability stuff.
The reason the economy is being driven into the ground and is a total mess is the runaway executive and the failure of Congress to act and the corruption. And so for me, those things go together—they’re two sides of the same coin.
Bacon: You’re both rejecting—you’re both saying my “affordability versus democracy” framing is wrong. Basically, that’s a false choice.
Copelovitch: I think that’s the debate that’s going to happen, and I think we have a sense of which candidates or potential candidates would be on which side of it. And I think it’s a false dichotomy.
Drutman: Yeah. I agree. You can talk about both. And you can link them as part of the same story—that this is the corruption of the American ideal. I just don’t know what the affordability policy story is that you would tell. I’m going to get into office and put price controls on everything?
Bacon: Cory Booker is literally saying, I will cut off your taxes if you make less than X amount of money—I forget the amount right now. But they are saying—Katie Porter, a lot of people are saying, You will not pay taxes if you’re a police officer, a teacher, a firefighter. That’s what they’re all saying. These are not great ideas—I’m just saying these are the ideas.
Drutman: And I feel like they’ve been roundly rejected by even the people who you would think would support them—even the popularism crowd has rejected these ideas for the most part.
Copelovitch: No. And this is—I think the only good thing to come out of the wildly illegal and unconstitutional DOGEing of the country and the government is it’s made people aware of what government actually does. Suzanne Mettler at Cornell has written about the submerged state—people don’t realize all the things the federal government does. And so if you’re telling people we’re going to defund the government by nobody paying income taxes, people have already started to realize what defunding and dismantling the government means in terms of public services.
So if you do think in terms of popularism or affordability—on some level, I think people are a little bit more aware of what the government does in the economy than they were a decade ago, for horrible reasons. But again, I think that factors in: yes, we would all like our taxes to be lower, but at the same time, if you’re telling me that then the government can’t afford all these things that I want, I’m not sure politically if that’s the right way to go.
Bacon: Guys, great conversation. I want to give you room—I know we’re at an hour here. If you have any final thoughts, I want to give you room to give them.
Drutman: I just want to emphasize that I think this is a real moment in which a lot of folks—not just us, but a lot of folks with real authority to do something—are really thinking big. And these conversations are really important. This is a moment in which a lot is possible, and we should really think big.
And I get frustrated when people say, Oh, this is a 30-year project, or something—because that’s just giving up on it. This is a unique moment. This is the moment in which we can do big change, because there is an appetite and hunger for it. The American people are screaming for it. Our institutions are fundamentally broken. And this is a moment when there is a demand and a necessity for some real leadership—and I’m starting to see it emerge.
Copelovitch: Yeah. I would just come back to the historical and comparative points that I was making earlier. I think it’s crucially important—and Lee is right, this is the moment—and I’m glad we’re talking about it here.
But I think, historically, as part of the project of American democracy completing Reconstruction—we’ve done this before, regularly, in previous eras. And it is a deeply American thing to keep updating our institutions, regardless of what the originalists say about what the founders intended. That’s a historical thing in American politics.
But the other—as an international relations and comparative person—is that we have a sense as Americans that we’re exceptional, that we’re the paragon of democracy, and our institutions are better than everybody else’s. And I think the thing is, as we were talking about Germany and other cases: other countries do representative democracy better than us in terms of institutions.
And we should learn the lessons of 300 years of what we know about institutional evolution of democracy. Nobody emulates and designs the U.S. Constitution in the 21st century. They look to other models. And as we’re thinking about fixing our problems, that comparative analysis—and a little bit of getting over ourselves as Americans—is important. Other countries actually do some things better. They do some things worse. But we actually need to look at those possible models of parliamentary democracy elsewhere as things that we as Americans might actually want to emulate.
Drutman: We’re the best country in the world. We should have the best political institutions.
Copelovitch: Yeah. And what the best ones are in 2026 is not what they were in 1787.
Bacon: It’s a great place to end on. Lee Drutman, Mark Copelovitch—you can find both of them on Bluesky. Very insightful political scientists. This was a great conversation. We’ll have more of these. Democracy reform is going to be a big theme for Right Now, so we’re going to have these guys back and others to talk about these kinds of issues. Guys, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Good to see you.
Copelovitch: Thank you so much for having us. Take care.
