Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Political Parties Have Changed Over Time, Conservatism and Bipartisan Cooperation w/ Dave Hopkins

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

Political scientist, professor at Boston College and author of Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics Dave Hopkins, joins Adam this week to discuss the structure of America's political parties, partisanship and party loyalty, how conservatism has changed, and more! This episode is brought to you by KiwiCo (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. My name is Adam Conover. And if you listen to the way we talk about our political parties, it often sounds like they're elementally opposing philosophies locked in an internal struggle, right? Republicans and Democrats seem to us like fire and water, angels and demons, ground beef and a tofu sandwich. But the surprising truth is it hasn't always been that way. From the period right after World War II into the 1970s, American government actually had a sustained period of bipartisan cooperation. Republicans and Democrats genuinely worked together to do big things like pass the

law that created our national highway system. And even more surprising to us today, the parties weren't ideologically sorted in the way they are now. There were such things as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. I know, I know. It sounds like I just said there was one such a thing as a round square or a good piece of pizza in Los Angeles. But it's true. Both ideologies were represented in both parties. Under such conditions, it was actually kind of hard to figure out what each party even stood for. In fact, the party's positions got so fuzzy that in 1950, some political scientists pushed to reform the parties to make them more ideologically coherent so voters would

have a better idea of what they were getting from their elected officials and could better hold them accountable. The political scientists literally wanted the parties to be more polarized. But the reason that the two parties back then seemed like such a mismatched dollar store bin full of different ways of thinking is that each one was actually a coalition of different groups. And these coalitions seem really weird to us today. Republicans had strongholds in the Northeast and were the party for big money business interests and for the middle class. In fact, the Southern states voted Democratic so consistently they were referred to as the Solid South.

And it was actually a bloc of conservative Southern Democrats who were primarily responsible for blocking progress on civil rights for decades. And I mean, think about it. A Northern labor activist didn't actually have that much in common with a white supremacy-loving southern senator. They just ended up in the same party through a quirk of historical fate. consented to something awful, the system of racist anti-democratic apartheid known as Jim Crow. And while many Americans desperately wanted an end to Jim Crow, I mean, after all, it was disenfranchising and killing them, they didn't have a voice in our political system. So bipartisan compromise

survived only because the fight that really mattered was never allowed to happen. But when the massive civil rights reforms of the 1960s finally happened, that buried fault line was exposed and the consensus fell apart. In 1964 and 1968, the solid South dissolved and the Democrats lost large parts of the South in presidential elections because they had supported civil rights. Nixon saw that the Republican base was moving south, and so he waged a campaign that played on racial resentment and fears of government overreach. And guess what? It worked.

Conservative Southerners fled the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, and Democratic strength in the South permanently waned. Over time, the South turned predictably red, and the Northeast flipped blue. The party of Lincoln became the party that represented white Southerners and African-Americans who'd been shifting the Democrats since the new deal made a decisive turn blue. And in the years after the parties continued to sort themselves, becoming more ideologically polarized, a trend that has continued in the decades since need I say as much. And since that polarization has resulted in less bipartisan compromise,

that means that Congress is less able to get things done. And it's not just the politicians. We, the public, have become increasingly partisan ourselves with our voting patterns becoming more and more polarized and Americans reporting that they are increasingly disgusted or frightened of the opposing party. So if you think that's a distressing state of affairs, you might take solace in the fact that the parties have changed

throughout history. And by recognizing that despite how they may appear, they are not ideological opposites locked in an eternal struggle. They're people organized in a specific social structure that determines the shape of our political life. And if we understand that structure, it can shed light on why our current era is so partisan and conflicted. And here today to talk about the structure of America's political parties, we have David Hopkins. He's a political science professor at Boston College, and along with his co-author Matt Grossman, he's the author of the book Asymmetric Politics, Ideological Republicans, and Group Interest Democrats. His work is fascinating. I think you're going to love this interview. So let's get straight to it.

Well, Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, thanks so much for having me, Adam. So when we're talking about the political parties in America, the parties, the members of each party so often have like a specific vision of who the other party is. You know, they, they, we have these ideas about Democrats think certain ways about Republicans, Republicans think certain ways about Democrats. Your work really investigates how the parties are actually structured, who actually makes them up, what they actually believe, how they operate. And that's so much at odds with our sort of day-to-day understanding of who our side is and who the other side is to the extent that people listening are on one side or the other. So what

are the biggest misconceptions that you think the public has about what these organizations actually are? Yeah. The sort of central argument that we make in the book Asymmetric Politics is that the two parties really are just different animals. And really the best way to understand the Democratic Party is that it's a coalition of social groups, whereas the best way to understand the Republican Party is that it's the agent of an ideological movement, the conservative movement. And what happens a lot of times is that people on one side develop a sort of picture, not only of their own party, but of the other party as being the image of their own party. So Democrats who might see the Democratic Party as the sort of social

group coalition that speaks for historically underprivileged groups, then sort of conclude that the Republican Party is just the mirror opposite. And so they're a party that speaks for privileged groups. And then on the other side, Republicans who see their own party as standing up for limited government, for individual liberty, for traditional values, for the Constitution, and for American nationalism, then conclude that arise out of the asymmetry of the parties feed the rancor that we see so much of in politics today because there's so much misunderstanding. Neither side is respecting the good faith disagreement of the other. They're sort of assuming that the other side exists just to oppose them or just to be the opposite of everything they hold dear. And I, yeah, I think that's a big part of the story of politics today. Yeah, you hear that in the language the parties use. If you watch, you know, the sort of Tucker Carlson types, they'll say, oh, the ideological left has a mission to X, Y, Z, which is not how the left would,

or at least not how the Democratic Party mainstream would describe themselves. They don't say we on the ideological left have a mission to do this. They sort of use the language. I see, I sort of understand your thesis here because the Democratic Party more talks about those individual groups whose interests they're trying to serve. And by contrast, yeah, the Democrats say, oh, the Republicans, that's the party of rich people and the party of white people, and they're trying to protect the interests of rich whites, essentially. And your thesis is that

both of those visions are incorrect. That's right. And that it's very easy to sort of ascribe these sinister motivations to the other side and dismiss what the other side is saying about what they believe is simply sort of window dressing for their real agenda, their real dastardly agenda. And we're sort of against that on both sides. We actually think both parties do a better job of understanding themselves than understanding the other side. And so we should have some respect for how each side talks about it itself more than we should have respect for what they say about the other side. those two, you know, if it's asymmetrical and we're really talking about two modes of operation, let's talk about each one of them. So how do you describe the way the Republican Party is organized? And I'm especially curious, in your book, how did you go about doing this research? How do you see, you know, what's your evidence for your conclusion here? Sure. So the Republicans, as we say, are basically an ideological movement,

or the party is sort of structured as the agent of an ideological movement, the modern conservative movement, which is now at this point in maybe you could say it's sixth or seventh decade of existence. It really arose after World War II as an opposition to kind of New Deal era liberal politics, democratic politics, and fairly quickly succeeded in becoming dominant within Republican Party organizations. And certainly by the 80s and 90s and the Reagan and Gingrich eras, we really get to a point where Republican Party exists more or less to advance conservatism. That's sort of the general united principle behind the party. And if you want to look at the evidence, virtually every major Republican leader, elected official, candidate after about the 1960s or 70s identifies

as a conservative, specifically identifies as someone who believes in the conservative movement, who is in politics in order to advance conservative principles. We also see at the mass level that the majority, strong majority of Republican members in the mass public identify personally as ideological conservatives and view, and again, view the party, view the Republican Party as existing to stand for these ideological principles. And so the evidence that we present in the book is this large array of data from public opinion surveys to look at what voters believe and the preferences they have and the identifications they have. We also look at the rhetoric of political leaders and what they say and do when they're in government. We look at the way that candidates run in campaigns. We look at the way that affiliated institutions that aren't explicitly officially part of the party, but sort of

are for all intents and purposes part of the party, like, for example, the conservative media universe. We look at how they behave and how they interact with politicians and voters and other party actors. So the book is really a combination of drawing on a lot of different sources, using a lot of different kind of analyses to bolster this sort of main argument that we're making. And where did this movement come from? I mean, I understand, you know, I know about Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and I know about it as a through line and something that's grown. But what is the, is there a particular source of it? Is there a big bang moment? Or how do you describe it?

moment or how do you describe it? Most of the historical scholarship about the modern conservative movement really looks at its roots in conservative publications like National Review, which was founded in the mid 1950s by William F. Buckley Jr., obviously a very major figure in the creation of the modern conservative movement. Groups like the John Birch Society and the Young Americans for Freedom and these other activist groups that arose and became very active around that time and really very quickly became very involved in the Republican Party at the organizational level. And then also, you know, there's just sort of a longer tradition of conservatism, ideological conservatism, small government conservatism in American culture that really goes all the way back,

in American history, that had sort of temporarily been in something of an eclipse in the 1930s and the 40s. You know, the Great Depression and the New Deal and the World War II sort of scrambled American politics in various ways. And one of the ways it did was that temporarily a lot of Republicans thought, well, we have to sort of move more towards the middle to win. And so there was a moment where a lot of Republican politicians were kind of distancing themselves from conservatism and supporting at least aspects of the New Deal and the sort of enlarged modern state during that time. And so these new generation of conservative activists in the 1950s and 60s really themselves thought that they were pulling the Republican Party and American politics back to its true roots. And so they saw a continuum

that had been temporarily disrupted and they wanted to sort of repair it. So it's this sort of coalescing of ideas, like a movement from many different sources, but these thoughts are sort of bubbling up and becoming firmer and firmer and expressing themselves in the party. What was like the last gap? I'm trying to think back. What was the last gasp of the sort of non-conservative republicanism? Is there, you know, who's the most recent example of that older strain from the party? Well, when we still, you know, when we look at people like Nixon and Ford, they're sort of interesting figures because in some ways they did identify as conservatives and had ties to conservative movement to a degree, but they also sort of felt

like if they got too far to the right, they would not be able to win elections, they wouldn't be able to govern. And so there was also some distance as well. So they're kind of this sort of the last generation prior to Reagan. Reagan, of course, runs against Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries and comes fairly close to beating him. But then, of course, Ford loses the general election and Reagan comes back and wins in 1980. And not only does he win the nomination fairly easily, but then he wins the general election. And one of the last remaining arguments against the conservative movement taking over the party by the dwindling faction of moderate and liberal Republicans was conservatism can't win. This was the lesson they took from Goldwater. Conservatism can't win. The countries just won't support it. And once Reagan wins and wins again and becomes very popular and wins in a landslide in his reelection campaign, that argument is out the door. And then there's really no ground for anyone else to sort of stand on in the party to try to make the argument that this conservative takeover should be resisted. Right. And now that is the dominant force in the party. I mean,

going back to even the Tea Party in 2008, that was an example of that sort of conservative movement in the Republican Party insisting, saying, no, no, no, you must cleave to the principles of this movement. That's the most important thing. Is that a correct analysis? policy agenda through or they don't satisfy the activists within the party, there's this sort of recurrent energy for a kind of ideological cleansing within the party. The reason for failure is almost always that the leaders of the party have drifted from conservative principles. And if they are able to return to conservative principles, then the party will be successful once again. So the Tea Party was obviously an excellent recent example of that dynamic, but that's a dynamic that has sort of repeated itself. We saw it in the 90s, we saw it in the

80s, we saw it in the 70s. This sort of continued suspicion on the part of the grassroots right that the institutional Republican Party and the politicians, especially in Washington, the federal politicians, they say they're going to shrink government. They say they're going to lead this conservative revolution. We send them to Washington and it doesn't happen. Something happens to them there. They get corrupted. They lose touch with their roots, something. And so we have to go find someone to get them. We need to support primary challengers. We need outsider candidates. We need some other force, conservative media personalities, some other force to sort of impose and enforce this ideological purity on the party.

And that's a dynamic that we've just sort of seen over and over again in the last few decades. Yeah, that's the Republicans kicking Eric Cantor out of the House of Representatives. He's a highly placed conservative leader, not conservative enough, and they boot him via the primary process. They boot Eric Cantor in a primary. They boot John Boehner, you know, John Boehner, one of the most successful speakers of the House, just in terms of how many seats he wins. In many ways, a very able speaker of the House. But during his speakership, finds this constant opposition from backbench conservatives. And that ultimately sort of swallows him up after a few years. But so your argument is, you know, something you hear from liberals a lot is, well, the Republicans are the party of the rich.

You got the Koch brothers. They're paying, you know, they're paying off everybody in order to advance their own interests. All the Republican, you know, rank and file are being hoodwinked by these rich folks. And that's what's going on. You would argue that that's not the case and that actually, no, this is a real belief that members of the Republican Party really believe this stuff. It really is a movement. And that's something that needs to be taken seriously. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, sometimes liberals especially are, they're sometimes liable to sort of believe that everybody deep down really sees things the way they do.

And if they say they don't, it's just because someone's buying them off or something like that. And we don't believe that. We think that, you know, there's a long history of a lot of work, not just money being put into politics, but grassroots activism on the right that is a big part of the success of the conservative movement and the success of it, especially in taking over the Republican Party, that goes all the way back to the early days. And to discount that as simply something that's artificially ginned up by corporate interest or something like that, I think is to miss the reality. Okay, well, let's turn to the Democrats. So again, the sort of classic, you know, Fox News version of the left is that, oh, it's the ideological left and they have a

campaign just like, you know, we on the right do, they're on a mission to do X, Y, Z. And again, you'd argue that's not the case. The Democratic Party is actually organized very differently. That's right. I mean, a lot of the Democratic Party isn't really left at all. We'll start simply with identification. When we ask people, do you identify yourself as a liberal, a moderate or conservative? Only about half the Democratic Party at the mass level identifies themselves as liberals. And so you have a huge moderate and you used to have a significant conservative block of Democrats. You don't have so many of those anymore, but you certainly have plenty of moderates left. Yeah, I don't think I've met a conservative Democrat very recently. Yeah, yeah. So the old Southern-style Democrats were actually conservative Democrats. They're pretty much an endangered species, but we still have plenty of moderates around.

I mean, you do see it sometimes in, you know, the governor of Louisiana, for instance, has a very strong pro-life stance. And as we're recording this, that's in the news right now. And you do see that occasionally in Virginia, places like that. But yeah, it's a little bit more of a dying breed to have that conservative Democratic strain. It is a dying breed, but the moderates are still, there's still plenty of them around, and not just politicians, but voters too, moderate Democratic voters. And when we ask people, why are you a Democrat? Why do you belong to the Democratic Party? Why do you like the Democratic Party? Not very many people say, because I'm a liberal and the Democrats are the party of the left. It's much more common for them to cite a group identity or group sympathy to explain why they belong to the

Democratic Party. They see the Democrats as the party of the middle class. They see the Democratic Party as the party of African-Americans or Latinos. They see the party as the party of feminists or the party of gays and lesbians or the party of just sort of people like them, social groups like them, Jews and other religious minorities, certainly. And that's really the essence of the Democratic Party. There are certainly liberals in the party and there are liberal ideas in the party, but they don't dominate the party to nearly extent that conservatism and conservative ideas dominate the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is just organized in a very different way, all the way up and down from politicians through activists down to the regular voters. And it really is this idea of group interest and group identity that is most often central to defining what the Democratic Party

is and defining what it means to be a Democrat for so many of the people who are active in the party. That's fascinating because you hear so often from both Republicans and Democrats, you hear criticisms of the phrase identity politics. That's something that a lot of people like to throw shade at, that identity politics isn't a good way to do politics and we should avoid it and we should do X, Y, Z instead. But your argument would be that is the soul of what the Democratic Party is, unless I'm misunderstanding you. No, I think that's right. Now, I mean, when we talk about identity politics today, usually that means race, gender, sexual orientation, maybe religion, not so much class, though, not so much some of the other things. So when people

say identity politics in terms of the way that term gets thrown around, they're often meaning something a bit more specific. They're talking about specific kinds of identities. What we would say is, yes, identity is very important. Social group membership is very important. But there are different kinds of social group membership. And historically, the view that the Democrats stand up for the working class, they stand up for unions, they stand up for regular people, has been very important to the mass appeal of the Democratic Party. And that's not a form of identity that gets as much attention in our current kind of media and social media discourse, but it's one that historically is very, very important to understanding where the Democratic support comes from in the electorate.

So now, why do you think that that divergence happened between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party? I mean, we can look back at the Republicans and say, okay, well, the conservative movement arose and took wing in the Republican Party. Is it simply that no comparable movement arose in the Democratic Party, or was it the result of a specific historical force

that caused it to become a coalition of different groups in that way? Yeah, it, you know, the result of a specific historical force that caused it to become a coalition of different groups in that way? Yeah, it's a really great question. We've thought a lot about that. I think one of the answers to that is exactly what you say, that it's just sort of a historical story. You know, each of these parties is its own separate institution that evolves the way institutions do, that creates its own culture. And so we shouldn't necessarily expect that each of the parties has a correspondingly identical history, and they've each sort of gone in their own direction. Certainly, there have been a lot of people who have put a lot of thought into the question of why we never really had a viable socialist movement in the United States, which is something that really distinguishes the U.S.

from a lot of other countries around the world that are otherwise comparable. And why we never really got that strong left-wing ideological mass movement the way that most of Western Europe did in the first half of the 20th century. And so there are various historical contingencies that can, I think, account for that. But there's another reason that I think is very central to our argument, really very central to understanding American politics, which is the way that public opinion looks in this country. about where they stand on a lot of specific policy issues, social security, healthcare, the environment, education, whatever, and you sort of add up where they wind up, you end up with a picture where most Americans are on the left side of center.

They're more liberal than conservative. Okay. So they want those programs. They want – They want those programs. They want policies that are what we would sort of think of as standard democratic or standard liberal policies, more spending, more regulation for domestic programs, that sort of thing. And you hear politicians say that people want single-payer health care. They want clean air. The voters are in favor

of our agenda is an argument that Democrats often make. Exactly right. And they have reason to say that they can point to public opinion surveys that show that the popularity of the Democratic positions on all these specific issues is well above 50 percent. And that's absolutely valid. But what's also valid and is also just as longstanding has been when you ask people broader questions about their values and principles, when you ask them about, you know, do they believe government should be bigger or smaller? Do they believe that individual liberty is more important than, you know, than government action? If you ask them about, should we preserve traditional values or should we be open to major social change? And even if you just ask them, are you on the left or on the right?

Well, in those broad strokes, you get a different picture. You get an American electorate that's mostly on the right side of center. And so what this means is that each party just has its own incentive to be a different kind of party. It's to the Democrats' advantage to talk about policy specifics, to emphasize practicalities, the groups that benefit from the various Democratic initiatives that they propose, and to make elections turn on, well, do you agree with us on policy or do you agree with the Republicans on policy? Republicans have an equally powerful incentive to have a very different conversation, to fight on very different turf, to talk much more broadly and generally about whose values do you share? Do you want things to go in the left or the right? Are you

for traditionalism or are you for progressivism? Are you for big government or small government? left or the right? Are you for traditionalism or are you for progressivism? Are you for big government or small government? And so that just reinforces, you know, it's sort of like a market system. The demands of the electorate reinforce the specific, practical, interest-based policy nature of the Democrats and the broad, symbolic, ideological principle and value characteristics of the Republicans. Each side is simply giving the voters what they want. That's really fascinating to me, because sometimes it seems as though when I'm looking at, you know, the competition between the two parties, sometimes it seems that the Republicans sort of campaign from the heart and the Democrats campaign from the head,

that a lot of Republican positions are, you know, if you just look at, you know, Trump versus Hillary in 2016, you know, Hillary would say, well, we should have, you know, here's my long description of my policy program to deal with this problem or that problem. And Trump very much argued from just, you know, it's it's much more emotional and much more based in what the basic value is that he is sort of trying to espouse. And this, you know, the same is true of, you know, Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren, right? If you look at the way that they campaigned in their various elections. And so you're saying that that's almost, that is even influencing the structure of the party, that dichotomy in a way. That's right. Because it's affecting who gets attracted to each party, on what grounds are they attracted? What are the demands they are making of their leaders within the party, and how do you best satisfy their demands? trying to, you know, each appeal to these voters who are simultaneously left-leaning on specifics and right-leaning on generalities, and they're trying to, you know, get them to see politics

in their terms and not the other party's terms during an election. So there's really a lot of factors that reinforce the distinct nature of each party that mean that, you know, that they have been preserved for decades and decades. You know, we've seen the same pattern over and over again. Yeah. The fascinating thing about your analysis is it really explains a lot, like, like you're describing this and I'm like, oh yeah, that, that adds up for why, why that election went that way or, or why that debate sounds that way or, or why one of these parties is winning in one area and losing in another. So just getting back to the Democrats, how does this sort of loose coalition structure affect what it means to be a Democrat,

how the Democratic Party functions, what are the things they have? I mean, they're not going out and primarying people like the way the Republicans are. They must have a different way of doing business. And what are the ways that that, you know, helps them and hurts them? Yeah, well, you know, in the past, the group coalition nature of the Democratic Party caused a lot of internal problems. I mean, there's this sort of old kind of folk wisdom about the Democrats. Will Rogers famously said, I'm not a member of an organized political party, I'm a Democrat. And there was a lot of truth to that because a lot of the various group elements

of the Democratic coalition didn't necessarily see eye to eye on policy or they were always sort of battling for control of the party. I mean, we're talking about a party that for several decades in the mid 20th century had both white Southern segregationists and African-Americans as base voters in the party. That's going to cause some problems. Bizarre. So there certainly were periods in history where the Democrats were fighting each other and they were primarying each other and they had quite famous internal friction. What's sort of happened over time is as the coalition has evolved, the current coalition gets along with each other a bit better. There aren't as many obvious contradictions in the interests or policy preferences of the elements of the coalition as

there used to be. Some of that is because those elements have themselves changed. For example, labor unions used to be quite anti immigration and quite anti environment, you know, because they believe their members were, their members' interests were not furthered by more cheap labor coming in over the border or shutting down, you know, plants and factories. Yeah, I mean, that's who the union's representing is the people working in the plants and factories. Exactly. And, you know, labor today, of course, labor has changed. It's both weaker and it's more dominated by public employees unions as opposed to the old manufacturing unions. but it gets along a lot

better with the environmentalists and they know it's not anti-immigration anymore. So there has been some change. There's nothing inevitable about the Democrats being more placid than the Republicans. It used to be, as I say, that the sort of conventional wisdom was the reverse, that it was the Republicans that were unified and respectful and harmonious, and it was the Democrats that were always fighting each other. So it just happens to be that the moment we're in now is a moment where the Democratic coalition is more harmonious. It's also a bit smaller than it used to be. That's part of the tradeoff. You know, losing the conservative white South, losing some of the working class vote has helped the internal unity of the party.

But it's also made it a little harder for it to win elections. Well, and that's one of the challenges facing the party. I mean, again, going back to as we record this, the governor of Louisiana is set to sign a very stringent anti-abortion bill. And that's a debate that is constantly happening within the Democratic Party. Should the party kick pro-life Democrats out? Should this be, does it make sense to have this as part of the coalition? And that's a very, strikes me as a very hard question

to answer. And I don't know, I almost want to push back on the idea that the Democrats are more harmonious. I mean, you're the researcher, so you probably have the evidence to back yourself up. But, you know, while there was certainly a ton of fighting, you know, to take 2016, for example, a ton of rancor on the left, sorry, on the right, you know, Ted Cruz versus Donald Trump and all that. It seemed that it sort of got resolved, right? That after Trump won, it was like, okay, he's the standard bearer of conservatism. He got sort of subsumed under that banner. But the, you know, the Bernie Hillary

division never went away. It's still there. And you see it bubbling up again in the current crop of candidates, perhaps even in an even more fragmented way. You see people, it's gotten very rancorous very early. Well, losing an election that everyone thinks you're going to win does have a tendency to get people upset. True, that'll fuck you up. And one of the reasons why we're seeing that is just because of the way 2016 turned out. Imagine if it had gone the other way, the kind of fight there might have been in the Republican Party about Trump having been nominated. Did that blow the election and now Hillary's president and whose fault is that? So I think some of that is simply a type of party politics that does apply equally to both sides,

which is that people get in a bad mood when they lose. I'm not sure that the divisions we see now, obviously different people will have different favorite presidential candidates. Certainly when you have 20 odd people running, there will be some tension and some disagreement. But I actually don't think there's unusual rancor. When you look, again, outside of, say, the social media world and look in the mass public, there are an awful lot of voters that are perfectly Democratic primary voters that are perfectly happy with lots of different Democrats running. There are plenty of people who have Joe Biden as their first choice and Bernie Sanders as their second choice or vice versa, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense if you sort of view

these as ideological battles. But again, part of our point in the book is that that's not how a lot of Democrats view politics at all. And even the Bernie versus Hillary race in 2016, which was widely, I think, interpreted as this ideological battle for the soul of the party, if you actually look at what differentiated Bernie and Hillary voters out in the country, it really wasn't ideology nearly so much as age, race, gender, and whether you were a Democrat or whether you were an independent. Those were the big things that sort of distinguished the Bernie side from the Hillary side. The ideological differences were much lower in 2016 in the Democratic side than a lot of people in the press kind of assumed they were. And again, that speaks to our point that

a lot of Democrats just don't think ideologically and they don't view the party as existing to advance to a particular ideological position. And Sanders, of course, is a bit of an exception to that. He is someone who very strongly identifies with an ideological position. He's also someone who historically has not run as a Democrat. And we think those are two things that are also somewhat related. Well, before we move off of the Democrats, that's my last question on that topic, because I think when Sanders arose as a presidential candidate, one of the things that gave him a lot of energy was that he was seen as the candidate of the ideological left. You know, within the Democratic Party, there certainly is a subset of folks who

would call themselves the ideological left, who affiliate with socialism or with, you know, various isms that can be found on the left. And I'm very curious, you sort of alluded to this earlier, is there any theory that you have or that you've heard expressed for why the ideological left historically has had so much less success than the ideological right? I mean, yeah, why is that? Yeah, I mean, it really is a great question.

I think some of it is simply that the way the left and leftist, however you want to describe it, activism in this country has traditionally been pursued. And I think there are a couple of ways in which it's different from the way that conservative or right-wing activism has been pursued. The first difference has been that there's been much less broad ideological activism and much more issue and group-specific activism on the left. So when you think about, you know, say the 60s, all right, which is certainly a time in history where you say, well, there was an awful lot of left-wing activism. There was, but it was sort of divided into pieces. There was the anti-war movement. There was the women's rights movement. There was the civil rights movement. There was the environmental movement. There was the gay rights movement. There was the disability rights movement. And each of those movements, you know, had its own set of organizations, had its own set of activism, had its own set of policy

objectives and its own approach to pursuing them. And you don't have nearly as much of the institutional broad left-wing organizations or interest groups or movements created during that time. Whereas on the right, it was much more that people built ideological organizations that took conservative positions and emphasized conservative goals on issues from A to Z. And so that's one difference. And so, of course, that reinforces the kind of group nature of the Democratic Party and the left of center politics in this country more broadly has been those divisions. They sort of live on in our interest group universe on the left. If you're a Democrat, you go and you speak to the NAACP, then you talk to the National Organization for

Women, then you talk to the AFL-CIO. As Republicans, you can go to CPAC and get all-in-one shopping. It's just different. I see what you mean. It's sort of, for instance, to take one of the big liberal, or maybe you'd even classify as left-wing victories of the last decade, would be the campaign for gay civil rights, for gay marriage, for same-sex marriage. for same-sex marriage. But that was pursued, that's not pursued as part of a overall left-wing agenda along with single-payer healthcare and revitalized labor unions.

It's pursued as we are fighting for gay marriage, that's the issue. And then all those other groups, they eventually get on board and it sort of like gets passed. But as opposed to on the right, that sort of, hey, these are the conservative values. We are simultaneously fighting for a small government and against abortion and XYZ. Is that sort of the argument?

That's exactly right. And then the other thing, you know, that I think is different about the left is that a lot of left wing actives, and again, there's a long history of this being true, the left is that a lot of left-wing actives, and again, there's a long history of this being true, has been somewhat ambivalent about whether elections and electoral politics are the best way to further their goals, and if so, whether they should work within the Democratic Party or not. Some people on the left aren't really sure if the Democrats are their friend or their enemy, people on the left aren't really sure if the Democrats are their friend or their enemy, and whether getting involved via the institutional Democratic Party is the best path to achieving their goal, or whether they should do direct protest, whether they should go through the media, whether they should sort of pursue other ways of trying to realize those goals. Whereas on the

right, I think there's been much more of our priority on party politics and winning elections as the avenue for advancing conservatism. And it may be that that's starting to change. We certainly are seeing these days more clearly left-wing activism within the Democratic Party, with Democratic socialists, with people getting involved in the party at the local level, running for office as Democrats. And, you know, maybe that will change. But historically, there's been much less of that than there's been on the right. And it's been pointed out that in the last Democratic wave, you know, when the Republicans had their enormous wave in 2010, that was a Tea Party wave. But the 2018 Democratic wave was not ideologically left-wing. There were many, many moderates elected as well, even as there were

also the AOCs of the world were also elected. Exactly. And, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gotten all this attention, and she is a very interesting phenomenon. But one thing she is not is representative of the typical freshman Democrat elected to Congress. You know, she's a different kind of politician. And many of these, you know, newly elected Democrats did not run on a platform of trying to purify the Democratic Party. Many of them represent seats that either went for Donald Trump or almost went for Donald Trump. They don't necessarily have any political interest in their own perception of starting a big ideological fight or staking themselves out on the left wing of the party. And so we need to remember that there are a whole bunch of people who are maybe less

newsworthy, less interesting to the media or to liberal activists, but they're also there and they're also important. And typically they have been the base of the Democratic Party. Well, on that note, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Dave Hopkins. So Dave, one question I have is when we're living in such an era of intense partisanship, when people within these parties tend to see the facts on the ground through a partisan lens, do you encounter resistance to this message when you're simply sort of trying to describe, hey, here's how these groups are organized? Is it difficult for people to see through the lens that they're viewing their own or the other party with and sort of follow your argument? Not generally, but there has been a little bit of that. You know, I remember

presenting some of our work at a conference back when we were just starting and having people in the audience really dispute the deference we were given to the sincerity of Republicans, which, you know, at an academic conference, you're probably going to get more of that than people saying we're going too easy on the Democrats, though even liberals and people who are on the left will sometimes say, well, you you're mischaracterizing my party is simply the handmaiden of various, you know, group interests. We don't have principles. We don't have values, too. So, yeah, you know, anytime you write about parties or say anything about parties these days, people people have such strong opinions about parties, about each of the two parties. And so, you know, you will get people who who will have their own perspective not sufficiently deferred to by your work. But in general, again, we're not trying to make a value judgment about either of the parties. We're not trying to say one's better than the other or that one is the way that parties should be and the other is the way that parties shouldn't be. We're really trying to just describe what we see. And we do believe there are implications for people who are partisans on both sides. And we believe that they will find our work relevant.

If you don't understand the reality, that's not really going to be in your interest. And I agree. Finding some way to understand the other side, even if you don't agree with them, is only going to benefit you in the long run. It's going to make you sharper about how politics actually operates. And if you have political, you know, here's one example is people on the left who are trying to make the Democratic Party an ideological party. They aren't really served by dismissing our argument. They're served by understanding, you know, that they're taking on a very ambitious project and that they're trying to remake the Democratic Party into something different from what it has been. And that's not going to be easy. And that's not something that would change even if you were to elect Bernie Sanders or some other

liberal hero president or anything like that. The party is still going to be largely what it was before unless it's really revolutionized top to bottom. And we think, you know, better to grapple with that reality, even if it's inconvenient, than to pretend that it's going to be an easy task to change how the party is. That could basically be my motto, grapple with the inconvenient reality is absolutely what I'm all about. Yeah. And, you know, one of the benefits of being an academic is stepping back from some of these arguments, you know, and trying to sort of we obviously want people to be informed citizens and we want people to participate in politics on behalf of what they believe. But we don't have any particular personal dog in some of these other fights where we're content to watch from the sidelines. So we've talked about how over the past 70 years or so, the parties have become much more ideologically sorted, that those conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans started to sort of fall away and sort into the two different parties. And we've had increased, increased,

increased partisanship over the past few years. You know, the, I know the numbers of people in each party who say that they're frightened or disgusted by the other party, by members of the other party, or who say they would be worried if their, if their child got married to a member of the other party, those sorts of numbers have gone up. And we've, you know, we've just seen partisanship rise on all fronts. Is that an aberration? Is that historically? Or was the period in post-World War II when you had relative cooperation between the two parties, was that the aberration in your view? Are we in the unusual times now or is this normal and 1950 was weird? times now, or is this normal and 1950 was weird? It's a great question. I think in terms of just the strength of partisanship and party loyalty, there are certainly previous periods in American history where we saw that. Most of the era between the end of the Civil War and the early first few decades of the 20th century, American politics was pretty partisan. And in

fact, in those days, if you were an independent, people thought you were a wimp. It's like, you should be a man and pick your side and be strong and proud on one side or the other. That also reminds me of how people used to feel. I can't remember where I read this, but that secret balloting used to be considered wimpish as well, because anyone who has the strength to vote for someone should be proud to have their name on that ballot and have everyone know who they voted for. That's right. And we didn't we didn't have the secret ballot in this country until the end of the 19th century. So this was a period when, you know, your partisanship was literally quite public. And that was part of the culture then. So and if you look at party line voting in

Congress during that era, it also was pretty high. So in that way, we're not in an unusual state. What's different though, is that in those days, the government was much smaller, especially the federal government. The stakes of elections were much less. And a lot of what partisanship was about in those days was simply about the exercise of power. So, you know, you'd have these party line votes in Congress, but it would be about should we hire the Democratic or the Republican printer to print the official government documents? You know, it was sort of a machine politics era, which didn't have nearly as much ideological content. And, of course, the, you know, the government was so small that really the number of issues that you were fighting over was a lot lower. an era where America is a great power, where there are tremendously complex both foreign and domestic issues and policies at stake in public life, but we also have this increasingly strong partisanship. And that is something that's new, and we haven't really had experience

with that combination of factors before in American history. With that combination of ideology and partisanship, people aren't just being partisan in order to be able to line their pockets with graft like in the 19th century. They're doing it to advance an ideological agenda. Yeah. And we've gotten to the point where there's virtually no major issue that's not a party issue. We used to have issues that cut across party lines and that where you would see bipartisan coalitions form on one issue. And then when another issue comes, you'd see a different coalition form. What's so unusual about this era is that virtually every issue now separates one party from the other, no matter what the actual content of the policy is that's being

debated. And so how does that happen? I've always been fascinated by that process. For instance, talking about climate change, issue close to my heart, I happen to agree with the vast majority of climate scientists on this matter. That's just me. But, you know, it's been much commented on that in the late 80s, this was a bipartisan issue when it first came up, that George H.W. Bush was very, you know, very concerned about the version of that issue that was raised at the time. And even George W. Bush, despite his actions later, you know, pulling out the Kyoto Protocol and et cetera, also gave at least lip service in that campaign, in his first campaign, to the problem of climate change more broadly. But then what's happened since then is that's become a starkly, starkly partisan issue,

which is unfortunate, I think, because when we're talking about, we would hope that matters of science wouldn't become partisan. How does that, how does that happen? Well, one of the reasons why it happens is that, you know, when issues become more prominent, when they get more attention, when activists in the parties sort of notice them more, sometimes that's the worst thing from the point of view of actually trying to get something accomplished, because it puts the stakes of the fight as being so high. It's this partisan fight all of a sudden, whereas issues that sort of can fly under the radar a little bit and that nobody sees as definitional to either side or either party, there's more room for bipartisan agreements to

come about. So for a long time, climate change was just not an issue that got a whole lot of attention in the popular media, among political activists, among rank and file voters. And so people didn't really care what the parties did. And so the parties could, you know, they could come to agreements or they could take positions that were at odds with the base of their party and get away with it. But as it's become a much more prominent divide, then all of a sudden, if you, you know, if you buck the party, you look like you're not a loyal partisan. you look like you're not a loyal partisan. And so the, you know, activists often talk about awareness and how important it is to raise awareness. And of course, there's a lot of good reason why that that's true. But sometimes awareness can be the enemy, as well as the friend of actually making policy. That's really fascinating. And it does strike me that there have been one or two cases of bipartisan, you know, issues being pushed through in the recent Congress. I mean, you know,

often you'll see it with a large, you know, something that large companies in America want, telecommunications companies, for instance, are often able to get their way. But also in the last year, a large criminal justice reform bill was passed, which, you know, my folks I know who work in that field think that that it was somewhat surprising to me that it passed, but also that it didn't get more coverage. And maybe what you're saying is the fact that it is not a very high profile issue is what enabled progress to be made on it. Well, imagine in a world where people on Fox News and conservative talk show hosts and people like that started arguing that anybody who worked with the Democrats on criminal justice was a sellout to conservatism. And what if a bunch of liberal activists were, you know, or, you know, civil rights people or whatever on the Democratic

side said any Democrat who works with Donald Trump on this issue is selling out, then we would probably see a big partisan polarization and we'd see probably nothing happening. The fact that it just wasn't an issue that got a whole lot of partisans riled up in the media or in the activist world almost certainly helped progress to be made sort of behind the scenes and under the table. And then all of a sudden you wind up with a bill that has bipartisan support. And one thing that is important to remember is that's still how a lot of policy gets made. I mean, a lot of policy obviously doesn't get made. We have a lot of gridlock in the system. But when we don't have gridlock, when we have actual legislative productivity, it's still the case that it often happens because there's some bipartisan cooperation that comes together and that members of both parties can sign on. And we're in an era right now where both parties are sort of pursuing this model of just get a majority and just sort of roll over the minority and pass what you to really incentivize bipartisan cooperation as the way to actually overcome the various veto points and gridlock in the system. But it's so fascinating, though, that the partisan identification and the media attention sometimes seems like it can almost

override the ideology. You're talking about how ideology is so important to the Republican Party. But if you look at healthcare, for instance, if you look at what happened to the program that became known as Obamacare, that was originally a, and you know, I'm not someone who's going to go to bat for that particular bill as a fantastic solution to healthcare. But, you know, that began as a, the Democrats trying to co-opt a Republican plan that Mitt Romney had championed in Massachusetts, that if you look at it through a different lens, it looks like it fits very well with Republican or with conservative ideology because it is basically, it works with the existing for-profit insurance companies.

It's very business focused. And there's an individual liberty, not liberty, but individual responsibility element to it where it says, hey, you shouldn't pass this cost on to everybody else and go to the emergency room and have a very high cost. You should be required to buy insurance in order to, you know, fend for yourself, basically. I believe that's sort of the conditions under which, you know, that's why it was passed by Republicans in Massachusetts. But then once it became a Democratic priority, that media machine that you're talking about sort of whipped into high gear and it became something that a Republican couldn't possibly be for. I find that very interesting. Yeah. And we talk a fair amount about the Affordable Care Act in the book because we

think it really is a great example of so much of what we want to say about the parties. And one point of it is that it shows that, again, something very distinctive about the United States, that the general suspicion of government and suspicion of bureaucracy and aversion to taxes and aversion to especially federal level power that is such a strong part of American political culture distinctively, really shapes so much of our policies that we live with, you know, all the way up from the beginning of the country up to the present day. And, you know, a solution that other countries have adopted for healthcare is, well, just create a single payer government plan. But the American solution is this very different solution. It's the solution that really tries to limit the role of direct government

provision that uses the private sector to deliver a lot of healthcare services, that uses market competition, that uses federalism with a lot of healthcare being administered at the state and local level rather than through the federal government directly. And this is all stuff that Democrats have adopted. It's true that even the Democrats feel the need to, you know, to sort of accommodate the aversion to federal power and government power that Republicans, you know, so often voice in our politics. And that really shapes the way in which our government operates in so many different policy areas. And the other thing that's funny about the Affordable Care Act is it's another great example of the difference between policy specifics and generalities, because when you looked at the polls of what people thought about the ACA, after about the

summer of 2009, there were somewhat more people who were against it than were for it. And a lot of the people who were against it, they were against it because it was too much government, it than were for it. And a lot of the people who were against it, they were against it because it was too much government. It was, you know, it was infringement on liberty and all these other sort of general philosophical and ideological differences. But if you ask people about the specific provisions in the AA, well, should we have Medicaid expansion? Should we have subsidies for people to buy insurance? Should we tell insurance companies they can't deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions? Almost all of the specific provisions of the ACA were very popular. And the battle really was between the Democrats trying to talk about, here are the specific things this bill will do, and here's how

it'll help you. And the Republicans saying, this bill is an assault on liberty and freedom, and it's un-American, and it's unconstitutional. It's that same pattern you were talking about where they, yeah, people like the proposal, but then their identity or their sort of overall ideology is against it. That's exactly right. But the thing is, the trap that Democrats often fall into is they assume what really matters is the specifics. And they look at those polls and they say, well, that's really what matters. Look, we have these provisions that get 65%, 70% approval. And they look at those polls and they say, well, that's really what matters. Look, we have these provisions that get 65 percent, 70 percent approval. And they forget how easily the right can mobilize the larger, more symbolic, more philosophical aspects of American political culture in order to engender opposition. in order to engender opposition. And I think the strength and the depth of the opposition to the ACA,

I think took almost everyone in the Democratic body to be a complete surprise. They really thought this was something that was popular, it was going to help them, people were going to like it, and they couldn't believe

that it was going to cost them the House and all the rest. But that is also a big major part of American public opinion is that much broader symbolic allegiance to conservative values and principles. And that's no less valid than the specific support for left of center policies that we also tend to see. How does media differ between the two parties, both in the specific segments of policies that we also tend to see. How does media differ between the two parties, both in the specific segments of media that we associate with them, your Fox News and your MSNBCs, but also the sort of broader media ecosystem? Is it the case that mainstream media is liberal?

Well, it's the case that most members of the mainstream media are liberal. I think the evidence is very clear on that. Most people who work as reporters or commentators for mainstream organizations tend to be personally left of center. of that in their product, though they certainly are not, they don't see themselves as openly advocating a particular ideological point of view or even that that would be proper for them to do. There are norms, there are professional norms of journalism that suggest that you don't do that. You pursue the idea of a neutral or objective newspaper story or television story or whatever. But we think the media in general is this really outstanding example of the asymmetry of the parties because there really isn't an openly left-wing media universe the way that there's an openly right-wing media universe. And people often equate Fox News and MSNBC, but they're really very different. Fox News has a tremendous amount of influence within

the Republican Party, and MSNBC just doesn't play that same role. Right. There's no politicians who are terrified of Chris Hayes. Yeah. Well, and Chris, right, exactly. And Chris Hayes isn't using his platform to attack politicians for being not true to their ideology. Right. The other thing, of course, is that the conservative media tells its own audience not to trust anybody but the conservative media. That is, in fact, outside of conservatism itself, that is the primary message of the conservative media that's repeated constantly. And that has had an effect. If you look at polls, Republicans trust the conservative media and they do not trust anybody else. And that's not the same for Democrats. Democrats aren't getting the message,

number one, that they shouldn't trust the mainstream media. MSNBC is not telling them, don't trust NBC, for obvious reasons. But they're saying, they'll pick on Fox. They'll say, oh, Fox is crazy. But they won't say, oh, don't read the New York Times. Don't listen to NPR. Don't listen to CNN. Only listen to openly liberal sources. And so for Democrats, yeah, there are plenty of Democrats that watch MSNBC, but they don't only trust MSNBC. They watch other and read other mainstream outlets too. And they report trusting those mainstream outlets much more. It's only Fox they don't trust. So there's just no symmetry there at all, and really no real balance between the role that Fox plays, which is such a tremendously influential role in Republican politics,

and the role that any openly ideological mediaaurus plays in democratic politics. You've also said that Republican faith in various institutions, like large-scale American institutions, has been on the wane over recent years. That makes me think of the Republican complaints against higher education, for example, and the ways in which the education system itself has become politicized. How has that happened and to what ends? that, again, it's an institution that's dominated by liberals and Democrats. It doesn't give a fair shake to conservative ideas or conservative beliefs or even facts that are inconvenient for left of center people. And so the attempt to build an alternative conservative media universe has a parallel in the building of the alternative universe the sort of flagship being the Heritage Foundation, but the American Enterprise Institute is another good example.

There are many others, even at the state level, a lot of individual states, there are state level think tanks and capital cities all around the country that are sort of mini versions of Heritage and AEI. the country that are sort of mini versions of heritage and AEI. And this was a very clear initiative to counterbalance what was generally perceived as the liberal bias of traditional academia of universities. And again, it's been quite successful. And it doesn't have the same counterpart exactly on the left.

Yes, there are left of center think tanks, but they're not as many of them. They're not quite as important. And they don't fill the same hole on the left because the left also trusts traditional academic sources and experts as well. So the long-term project of building explicitly conservative institutions that are in control of information and expertise to balance out what we're seeing as inherently hostile mainstream institutions, both in the media world, but also in the educational system, media world, but also in the educational system, has been, again, a multi-decade project on the right. And we can see the, you know, the fruits of it in the politics of the current moment. It sometimes seems to me that when I, you know, watch conservative, you know, validly conservative pundits, like, say, you know, your Hannity's and your Carlson's speak,

conservative pundits like, say, you know, your Hannity's and your Carlson's speak, that there's a degree to which they try to almost increase the degree to which we look at these institutions through a polarized lens, that they themselves seem to sort even previously nonpartisan institutions like academia or, you know, the news media into, well, this is a liberal institution or a conservative institution. And it seems to me that people on the left do that, or sorry, people in the Democratic Party, since we're trying to divide those two, do that less. Is that the case? And if so, why that pressure? Well, again, part of it is reality. I mean, it is true that most academics are on the left compared to the right. And there are cases where I think you can suggest with a fair amount of credibility that show that the right doesn't always get a fair hearing in academia the way the left does. And so there is a germ of truth in a lot of this. And I think

the figures that you cite are people who are very familiar with that. That's been part of conservative culture and conservative lore going a long way back, going back to William F. Buckley and the first generation of conservative movement to William F. Buckley and the first generation of conservative movement. Buckley famously wrote God and Man at Yale, which is a book that's all about the liberal capture of academia. And that's nothing new. What is new, of course, is the ability of this modern mass market conservative media universe exposed to that message of suspicion and distrust than used to be. And in our current moment, I think it's compounded by the sort of generation gap that has emerged in our politics, which has not always been there, but is there

today where there's, you know, the mass base of the Republican Party is older than the mass base of the Democratic Party. And so it's not just professors, but college students that are now seen as sort of the enemy of conservatism. Right. More than was true in the past. And so if you watch Tucker Carlson, of course, that's a major part of his, you know, a theme of his programming is the hostility of campuses in general to conservative ideas and conservative personalities and the, you know, crazy left-wing activities that are going on at college campuses today. And again, that has very deep roots. But I think what's different about today

is that a lot more people are being exposed to that message and seem to be believing that message. The other thing that's changed has been that it used to be that conservatives and Republicans were better educated at the mass level than Democrats were. That in fact, having a college degree helped predict, mostly would predict that you would be you know, having a college degree helped, you know, predict, mostly would predict that you would be a Republican rather than a Democrat. And so the Republican party, you know, traditionally had a very, had a well-educated base, at least a big chunk of the base was well-educated and had a lot invested in state university systems, in academia in general, even if they did have, you know,

complaints about the liberalism of professors, there still was this idea that, you know, these are people who are college graduates and that they really valued colleges as institutions. But with the change that we're starting to see now, the evolution of the mass base of the party now, it's much less true that at least, especially if you look at whites, you know, in the first time in 2016, whites with college degrees were more likely than whites without college degrees to vote for Democrats. And that seems to be the way where we've been headed, even before Trump. Trump sort of accelerates that divide, but the divide was in the works before Trump came along. And that may suggest that in the future, support for higher education,

support for student programs, things like that may just be more partisan of an issue, that Republicans will not see their own constituents as clamoring for that, but rather as suspicious of the university system and higher education in general. And that may really change the politics, especially at the state level where state universities are so important parts of state governments and where state legislatures and governors have varying degrees of power over them, certainly over their budgets. We may see that happen more. It has already happened to some extent in places like Wisconsin. I think we may see that more in the future, that higher education becomes yet another issue where there's more polarization by party than there used to be in

the past. And that's a shame because I think that if we, you know, if folks step outside of their partisan shells for a second, we can agree that education writ large is something that we all have an interest in and that I would hate to be divisive along partisan grounds. But the reason I love talking to you is because, you know, we're day by day sort of stuck in this partisan morass, you know, when we read the news, when we follow, you know, commentary on social media, on all of our media outlets. And it's wonderful talking to you because you're actually studying partisanship and the parties in a dispassionate way and able to give us, you know, the historical context, the sociological context for what we're seeing in a

way that, you know, helps me understand them better. So my last question is, since we've been talking about how the parties have changed over time historically, and since it seems like nobody is happy right now with where we're currently at, how do you see things perhaps changing in the future? Do you see where we're at as an equilibrium at this moment of hyper-partisanship where we're going to be at it for a while? Or is this an unstable moment that's going to become something else? And do you have any hint of what that might be? It's a great question. I wish I could see the future with a lot of confidence. I'd be in great shape. It's really tough to see these things before they happen. So if you have to bet, if you're forced to bet, you sort of bet on things not changing too much because polarization seems to beget polarization. As one party becomes more aggressive, the other party responds. And because the two parties are so evenly matched today, they both, you know, we have a lot of very close elections.

Party control of Congress goes back and forth. Neither party is doing badly enough that they feel like they really need to tear it down and start again or really rethink their approach. switch in the vote away from getting right back in. So there are a lot of reasons to believe we are in somewhat of a stable pattern. What I would say we can take from history, though, is that things do have a way of changing, often in ways that are difficult to anticipate. Obviously, the Great Depression is an example of something that fundamentally changed party politics in the U.S. The Civil War obviously did. We've had lots of changes, just, you know, smaller changes in terms of social movements or in terms of changes in, you know, in technology or in trade or in economics that have reshaped our parties as we've gone along. And so, you know, we don't necessarily know how to predict those things or see them coming before they happen, but we do know that there is an element of change and evolution as well as elements of stability in our politics.

And there's no reason not to think that there's more change around the corner. It's just a question of exactly what it would look like. At the very least, we can perhaps take a little solace in the fact that the way things are aren't the way things have to be, that change is possible, it has happened, and it might happen again. That's right. And another thing that I think, you know, not just us, but lots of political scientists will say, political scientists tend to be more positive about parties than everybody else. Everybody likes to dump on parties all the time and complain about parties and partisanship is sort of an epithet in American politics. George Washington hated the parties. partisanship is sort of an epithet in American politics. Yeah, George Washington hated the parties.

That's right. You know, there's a lot of people who, you know, who have that view. Political scientists tend to be more positive about parties just because we see the necessity of parties, that parties play a role that is so central to the whole concept of representative democracy. And going after the parties and weakening the parties and trying to tear down the parties doesn't necessarily lead us to a better politics either. And so I think if there's a solution, the solution will often come from the parties. And so what I would say is, if people want politics to change, if they don't like how things are now, what I and what most politics experts,

political scientists would argue is get involved in the parties, you know, change the parties from the inside. That's how they can change. You know, the parties are in their own way fairly porous, they're not walled off from the average person. You could go to a local party meeting in your neighborhood and within a year you might be precinct captain or you might be even running for local office or something like that. There are lots of opportunities for people to get involved. And we've seen change happen, you know, within the parties just precisely through that mechanism. And so we're, you know, Matt and I are like, as I said, most of our colleagues, we're not anti-parties. And we don't think that weakening the parties necessarily

solves the problems that people see in politics and sometimes makes those problems actually worse. We think that the parties just need to be straightened out in a way. They need to be pushed in a more productive, positive direction rather than being sort of the opposition. And that's really what we believe after a whole big project of looking at the parties and looking in the history of the parties. I think that's what we still believe more than ever. I mean, that's incredible. If after looking at the structure of American political parties for what's got to be your entire career, or at least a good chunk of years, you have reason for optimism, that makes me feel a lot better because I would have expected you to be the most pessimistic person on the planet. And so, yeah, that's a wonderful message. Get out there, go to your

local party election that you think is too small to even bother with, and maybe you can make a difference there. I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk to us about this, Dave. Well, I really appreciate you having me, Adam. It's really, really been fun. What's the name of the book, One More Time, for our audience?

The name of the book, One More Time, is Asymmetric Politics, Ideological Republicans, and Group Interest Democrats. Go look it up at your local bookstore or library. Thank you once again, Dave,, and group interest Democrats. Go look it up at your local bookstore or library. Thank you once again, Dave, for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Adam. Appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to Dave Hopkins for coming on the show.

And thank you folks so much for listening. My name is Adam Conover. If you enjoyed the show, please give us a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts, whether that's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts. I don't care where you get it. Just leave us a rating.

It would help us out a lot. I'd like to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our superstar researcher Sam Roudman, and party god Andrew WK for our theme song. That is it for this week's

Factually. See you next time. That was a HeadGum Podcast.