This Old Democracy

Micah Sifry
  • 5.0 (6)
  • POLITICS

Hosted by Micah Sifry, This Old Democracy explores the ideas, movements and people working to rescue our faltering political system -- and rebuild American democracy on a stronger, more inclusive and truly representative foundation. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Center for Ballot Freedom, a cross-partisan nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy.

  1. MAR 30

    Voters are not Thinking like bankers. We're thinking like sports fans.

    Political scientist Lilliana Mason on social sorting, partisan self-deception, and why the two-party system makes all of it worse. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features the remarkable Lilliana Mason, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, in a wide-ranging conversation with host Micah Sifry.   Mason offers a rigorous — and at times unsettling — account of why Americans have stopped thinking of their political opponents as fellow citizens. She discusses parties, politics, policy, and young people. We really need to think about this one because the civil in civil society is an essential piece of the democratic puzzle.  In Mason's view, political parties are essential to democratic decisionmaking. "[Parties] are a really useful informational shortcut for us. We can't ask our citizens to read every single piece of legislation and every piece of the party platform and know about all of the different parts of the platform and fully understand these policies. The reason we have representative democracy is because we don't all have time to do that and we can't expect everyone to do that. And so what parties do is they simplify that political decision that we are given the privilege of making as citizens. We can't all be experts. And so the parties give us a much simpler choice." Mason's work centers on a deceptively simple insight: we don't really choose our political parties the way we choose between competing products on a shelf. The "banker mind" model of democratic citizenship — the idea that voters coolly weigh policy options, calculate trade-offs, and select the candidate who best serves their interests — is, she argues, largely a myth. The reality is considerably messier. "Our punditry tends to assume that we think about politics sort of like bankers and we're choosing investments with a sober and quantitative mind and assessing the positives and negatives, you know, is this policy marginally affecting my family in this number of decimal points? But actually, that's not how we participate in politics. We're much more like sports fans when we engage in politics." What has happened over the past six decades, Mason explains, is a process she calls social sorting: the gradual alignment of partisan identity with race, religion, geography, and other social identities. In the 1950s, both parties contained meaningful internal diversity — cross-cutting coalitions that made it impossible to know, just from someone's party registration, very much about who they were. That era is over. Today, the parties have sorted themselves into two fairly coherent tribes, and the sorting makes genuine cross-partisan contact rarer with every passing election cycle. What makes social sorting especially durable, Mason says, is that people genuinely believe they are reasoning independently — even when they're not. She describes a political science experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned either a Democratic or Republican label to the same welfare policy. Democrats reliably preferred the "Democratic" policy, and Republicans the "Republican" one, even when the substantive details of the policies had been swapped. When asked afterward whether their party had influenced their preference: "Everyone said, not at all. That was entirely me. I have entirely come up with the reasons for my desire to have this policy enacted. We don't know that we're doing it. And also in that experiment, they said, do you think other people are influenced by their party? And everybody says, yes, definitely. Everyone else is influenced by their party, but I'm not." The distortions don't stop at policy preferences. Mason's research also documents systematic misperceptions of who actually belongs to each party. Americans consistently overestimate the share of Democrats who are Black, LGBTQ+, or non-Christian — and overestimate the share of Republicans who are elderly or evangelical. "Most people assume that Democrats are 35% LGBT and the true number is 5%. They assume that Democrats are 40% Black and the true number is 25%." These stereotypes aren't merely factual errors. They shape the emotional valence of partisan identity: if you believe the other party is almost entirely composed of groups you view negatively, your hostility toward that party will track your feelings about those groups — whether or not the factual premise is accurate. The stakes of all this, Mason makes clear, are not merely rhetorical. In her book, Radical American Partisanship, she and Nathan Kalmoe measure the kinds of attitudes that social scientists have found to precede mass violence in other contexts — dehumanization, vilification, openness to political aggression. The numbers they've compiled since 2017 are worth sitting with: "In 2017, it was about 40% of Democrats and Republicans who were willing to say the other party was evil. It's gone up to almost 70% of Republicans in 2022. Last summer, it's around 50 to 60% of Republicans and Democrats. In terms of dehumanizing the other side — we're up to 40% of Democrats and Republicans who are willing to say that people in the other party don't deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals." Mason is careful not to predict catastrophe, but she is equally careful not to minimize the data. The nightmare scenario, she says, is a tit-for-tat cycle: roughly 20% of Americans say violence to achieve political goals might be justified — but when asked what they'd do if the other side starts it, that number climbs to 40, 50, sometimes 60%. Sifry asked Mason about the degree to which the two-party system itself is accelerating these dynamics. Her answer was unambiguous: "The two-party system is a huge part of this. There's a psychological reason for that, which is that when you have a perception of a zero-sum competition, then the competition is more intense. Either we win or we lose. And the people who benefit from our loss are always the same people." Mason explained that In multi-party systems, by contrast, the lines of "us" and "them" are inherently more fluid. Parties that are adversaries in one election may be coalition partners in the next; voters have in their living memory experiences of that fluidity. Research comparing "affective polarization" — the raw emotional dislike of partisan outgroups — across democracies has found it to be less intense in systems where coalitional politics are the norm.  The problem in the United States, Mason notes, is institutional: the two-party structure is deeply embedded in the rules of how we run elections. Dismantling it requires creativity — precisely the kind of creativity that efforts to revive fusion voting and open up the ballot are attempting. On the question of democratic restoration, Mason offers two distinct registers of hope. The first is structural and long-term: fixing the institutional incentives that make our current polarization rational from each party's perspective. The second is personal and immediate: recognizing that norms — unlike laws — are enforced socially rather than by state power. Which means ordinary citizens have more agency than they might think. "If we don't like the behavior that we're seeing from our political leadership, we ourselves enforce the social norms around politics. And if we feel like politics is getting too nasty and rude and uncivil, then one thing we can do is model good behavior, discourage bad behavior, and be the people that we wish our leaders were being." Asked how she personally copes with staring daily into the abyss of American partisan hostility, Mason offers a warmer note. She reads fiction before bed. She teaches college students. And she finds something genuinely encouraging in the generation that has never known a political moment before Trump: "This young generation — they don't remember a time before Trump. And they are pretty disgusted with the way they see the adults behaving right now. And they want a different kind of politics... They're creative, they're interested, they're paying a lot of attention, and they want something better."    RECOMMENDED READING Liiliana Mason's books include: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity  and Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (with Nathan Kalmoe)

    32 min

  2. MAR 17

    What does a democracy veteran and former Secretary of the State of Connecticut make of this moment — and what comes next?

    A new episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport, who has four decades of democracy reform to draw on — and a lot of reasons to stay optimistic In a moment when the democratic project feels genuinely imperiled, it helps to hear from someone who has been in the fight for four decades and still wakes up ready for more. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport — community organizer, state legislator, Connecticut Secretary of the State, former president of Demos, former national director of Common Cause, and current executive director of 100% Democracy, an initiative he co-founded to promote universal voting. Over the course of an expansive conversation with host Micah Sifry, Rapoport traces an arc from the antiwar movement to the ballot box to the boardrooms of national advocacy, and explains why — despite everything — he remains an optimist. Rapoport pulls no punches about where we are: "There are zero guardrails on what Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the movement behind him would like to do to restrict and take over our democracy. So that's the worst of times." But he balances that assessment with a characteristic refusal to despair: "[A]s the song goes, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Because I do think that there are lots of ways in which people are working, as you are, Micah, to make democracy better. And I think that's a really important thing. I am an optimist on this question, because I think that the forces to preserve and improve democracy will ultimately prevail." Rapoport's path from Vietnam War protester to Connecticut state legislator was not a straight line, but it had an internal logic. After years of community organizing — working to empower people and make government more responsive — he watched the Reagan revolution demonstrate, with painful clarity, that electoral power could undo in months what organizing had won over years. The answer, for him and for many in the community organizing world at that moment, was to enter the arena directly. He ran for the Connecticut state legislature in 1984, won, and was assigned almost immediately to the elections committee — which he would eventually chair. Ten years of immersion in election law and voting rights policy followed. "It's not a super straight line, but there is definitely a through line... the idea that there is tremendous inequality economically and socially and racially in the country, and at the same time, our democratic institutions are failing to deal with it." Rapoport's run for Secretary of the State in 1994 offers one of the most compelling real-world demonstrations of what fusion voting actually does. Rapoport, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by A Connecticut Party, the independent, centrist party that ex-Republican Lowell Weicker had created in 1990.  When the votes were counted, Rapoport had received 365,000 votes on the Democratic line — and 125,000 more on the "A Connecticut Party" line. He won the race by 2,237 votes. "Absent A Connecticut party, no way I would ever have been elected." That experience didn't just help him win. It shaped how he governed. One out of every four of his voters had come to him on a third-party line — moderate, old-line Republicans who crossed over based on shared values around the income tax fight and civic reform. He knew who they were and felt accountable to them. "I definitely was more bipartisan than I might have been — more conscious of making sure that the people who voted for me on the Connecticut Party line felt good about it." To critics who argue that fusion is too complicated for voters or too difficult to administer, Rapoport has a direct response: "It's not only not rocket science, it's not even algebra. It's just third grade math. You can vote for a candidate on one line and on another line, and at the end of the night you add the two votes together to get a total." He adds, with characteristic directness: "I'm urging any secretary of state who's thinking about it to give me a call. I can give you a hands-on lesson. It's easy." As Secretary of the State, Rapoport oversaw elections in a state where fusion had been practiced continuously and understood the nuts and bolts of running it well. He and Micah also discuss what was achieved beyond fusion: implementing the National Voter Registration Act ("Motor Voter") aggressively and thoughtfully; expanding access to the primary system; and thinking of the office itself as, in Rapoport's phrase, the "advocate in chief for democracy and participation." After leaving office, Rapoport continued pushing the frontier. At Demos, which he led for 13 years, he helped drive the national expansion of election day voter registration — from six states when he started to 25 today. The goal was always the same: close the gap between who is eligible to participate and who actually does. But at some point, that incremental approach confronted its own limits. Rapoport describes the moment of clarity: "I had been working for all the democracy reforms — same-day registration, early voting, mail-in voting, restoration of voting rights — and all of those moved the needle of expanding voter participation, but not very much. I said, is there anything that could really move the needle?" The answer came from an unexpected quarter: a paper by E.J. Dionne and William Galston for the Brookings Institution, which made the case for treating voting as a required civic duty. Rapoport learned, to his admitted embarrassment, that 25 countries already have mandatory voting — and that Australia has had it since 1924, achieving 90% turnout in every election since. "I said, wow, this is something that needs to be discussed in the United States." The result was a book co-authored with Dionne and the creation of 100% Democracy, which advocates for what Rapoport calls "universal voting" — mandatory participation, but without mandating a vote for any particular candidate (you can leave a ballot blank or mark "none of the above"). And crucially, this doesn't require federal legislation or a constitutional amendment. States set the time, manner, and place of elections. They can do this themselves. Bills are currently moving in Connecticut and Illinois. Rapoport has continued to build relationships with elections officials around the country, attending the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference and speaking with counterparts from both parties. He finds real openness — both to fusion and to universal voting: "I spent some time in Washington at the [NASS] conference and had great conversations with Secretaries of State, both Democrats and Republicans." That cross-partisan dialogue matters. Rapoport's own career is proof that fusion works best when it transcends party lines — and that the voters who use third-party lines are often precisely the voters politicians need to understand and speak to. At the end of the episode, Micah asks the question he poses to all his guests: how do you cope? How do you keep your head up? Civic faith, says Rapoport. "What gives me hope and keeps me going is the sense that there really are — and I believe a majority of people in this country who want to participate, who care about making our country a better place, who are willing to push back. I mean, you look at the incredible civic pride that has come over Minneapolis since the ICE raids. I just think there's a lot of ⁓ really, really good things happening.  If I can be part of that and maybe even bring some new ideas to it, that's a good reason to get up in the morning."

    27 min

  3. MAR 5

    How Natural Is the Two-Party System? (Spoiler Alert: Not at All)

    The latest This Old Democracy podcast features political scientist Lisa Disch on the artificial roots of two-party rule, the buried history of multi-party democracy in the US and a credible strategy for creating a better party system.  If you've ever felt trapped by a disagreeable, binary choice at the ballot box — known in elite political science circles as the "hold your nose" vote — Lisa Disch wants you to know that feeling isn't a personal failing. It's a structural condition, and not a natural one. It didn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to stay this way. Disch, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, joins host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy for a wide-ranging conversation about the rules, myths, and suppressed history behind America's duopoly. The result is an illuminating conversation — essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what's broken about our politics, but how it got this way, and what we can do about it. Disch opens with a provocation: she would ban the very phrase "two-party system" if she could. Not because two parties don't dominate American politics — they obviously do — but because calling it a "system" implies something organic, inevitable, and permanent. It's none of those things. "Most people in the US accept third party failure as a matter of course. They feel that third party candidacies put them in a terrible position — in the grips of a terrible dilemma. Do I vote for a candidate who might represent me better, but may end up throwing the election to the candidate whom I, and actually most people, least prefer? And we assume that this is just a natural feature of the two-party system. And we don't think about the institutions that make this game so stacked against third political parties."  That's not a description of nature. It's a description of rules — rules that were deliberately designed, largely at the turn of the 20th century, to choke off the extraordinary multi-party vitality that had characterized American democracy for most of the 1800s. The history Disch tells is one familiar to regular readers of this Substack, but unfamiliar to most Americans. Before the adoption of the government-printed "Australian ballot" in the 1890s, parties printed their own ballots, and fusion candidacies — where a single candidate could and did appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — were common and powerful. They allowed third parties to build real coalitions, elect real officeholders, and sustain real organizations. Then came a two-step trap. First, states adopted ballot access thresholds that made it costly and difficult for minor parties to qualify. Then — and this is the critical piece — some states quietly banned fusion by requiring that no candidate could be nominated by more than one party. The effect was devastating: "What this meant was that partisans of one party would not vote for the candidate that looked like it was the candidate of the other party... populist voters [would say], 'I'm not voting for the Democratic party. They're a terrible party. They supported slavery. Why would I do that? I'm going to lose votes.'" A populist organizer of the era saw it coming with brutal clarity, as Disch quotes: "Whenever a fusion candidate running under the Democratic heading alone produced many stay-at-home votes – that is to say abstainers –  in the future, we populists will have to get on the ballot by petition." They understood exactly how the new rules would hollow out their organizations. And they were right. "This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for third political parties to have any lasting presence in US elections — because you spend an enormous amount of resources just getting on the ballot." The near-destruction of fusion voting didn't just limit ballot options. It destroyed something more fundamental: the capacity of ordinary people to build durable political organizations that could teach civic skills, develop political identities, and force new issues onto the national agenda. "Party organizations are incredibly useful because they teach voters civic skills and give them a commitment to participation that does not revolve around a charismatic person." This is why, Disch argues, 20th-century third-party efforts so often collapsed into personality vehicles — Perot, Nader, Stein — rather than sustained movements. Without the rules that enable organization-building, third parties become flashes in the pan. And flash-in-the-pan politics, as Micah Sifry noted in his own earlier writing (which Disch quotes back to him), leaves us with "chronic explosions of anti-incumbent sentiment and independent celebrity bids for office as the only alternatives to the duopoly." So far this is familiar stuff to most readers. But then Disch explains the deeper damage, far beyond electoral mechanics, that is all-too-familiar to American voters and organizers.  "The two-party system we have today is giving us what political scientists like to call one-dimensional conflict. And that describes a conflict in which it can only be zero-sum because if you win, I lose, and in which I see you in very narrow terms. I assume that we disagree on everything. So all my beliefs fall in one line and all of your beliefs fall in one line." A multi-party system, by contrast, offers a more nuanced picture of political reality — one where people's beliefs don't have to be sorted into two pre-packaged bundles, and where coalitions can form around specific issues rather than tribal identities. One of the most striking moments in the podcast conversation comes when Sifry asks what happens when readers and students first encounter "buried history" — in this case, when they learn that the Constitution says nothing about political parties at all: that for most of the 19th century formidable third parties succeeded one another with what historian John Davis, in 1933, called "bewildering rapidity:" and that the United States is the only democracy in the world in which a major new party did not emerge in the entire 20th century.  Buried history, says Disch, produces first surprise — and then a sense of possibility. "They think that the two-party system has always been what it is now. And anytime you realize that something wasn't always what it is now, and that what it is was the product of decisions that people made, then you know that, well, those could be changed." Perhaps the most inspiring part of the conversation is Disch's account of the abolitionist third parties of the mid-19th century — the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers, and eventually the Republicans. These weren't just moral crusaders; they were sophisticated political strategists who understood that you can't change what people fight about without first building the organizations to fight differently. "For slavery to become a political fight, the abolitionist parties had to make it so — because both the Whigs and the Democrats were economically and politically rooted in the institution of enslavement in the same way that both of our political parties today are rooted in the economy of fossil fuel." The Liberty Party made a deliberate choice: it would be a political abolitionist party, not just a moral one. That meant building a coalition not of people who all agreed on the deep moral wrongness of slavery, but of people who could agree that enslavement was an attack on democracy itself — and that it threatened the freedom of white citizens alongside enslaved ones. It was a big-tent strategy in the service of a radical goal. "They not only built a coalition with people that they didn't fully agree with... It wasn't 'you're either in or you're out.' It was 'I bet we've got an argument for you that might bring you in.' And then they shifted the line — or they drew a line of conflict that didn't exist before." What made all of this possible - all of it - was fusion voting, which allowed these emerging parties to ally with sympathetic politicians from within the major parties as they grew. Without that flexibility, none of it could have happened. At the close of the conversation, Sifry asked the question he puts to every guest: in the face of what feels like the gravest threat to American democracy in living memory, what gives you hope? Disch draws from two wells. One is her students at the University of Michigan, whose engagement and seriousness move her. The other is her work as an Ann Arbor City Council member, where she's seen residents vote to tax themselves to fund affordable housing and carbon-free infrastructure — doing, as she puts it, "the boring, dirty, hard, slow work." That combination — engaged young people and vibrant local democracy — is, Disch suggests, where the seeds of a different kind of politics might take root. Maybe, someday, with better rules, those seeds could grow into something more.

    33 min

  4. FEB 18

    Is fusion voting being reborn in Kanasas?

    In a moment when many Americans feel trapped between rigid partisan choices, a reform movement in Kansas is working to widen the political lane. In the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry interviews Aaron Estabrook about United Kansas, a newly formed political party and reform movement dedicated to restoring fusion voting and expanding voter choice. Estabrook is well suited to be one of the organizers of the United Kansas effort. He is a community builder, veteran, father and the executive director of the Manhattan (KS) Housing Authority. The conversation comes at a pivotal moment: United Kansas is heading into oral arguments in its lawsuit challenging the state's anti-fusion laws, a case that could reshape how parties and voters express political preferences in Kansas. Estabrook describes United Kansas as more than a conventional third party. It is a reform movement built around expressive voter choice and coalition politics. "United Kansas is a political reform movement rooted in one simple idea. Kansans deserve more voice, not less." The party's core goal is to restore fusion voting — allowing multiple parties to endorse the same candidate — so voters can signal both candidate support and broader political alignment. "Fusion voting lets someone say I support this candidate and I'm doing it as a United Kansas voter signaling support for a broader reform movement while still influencing who wins." Rather than fragmenting the electorate, the movement aims to enable coalition-building and give moderates and reform-minded voters a political home. Kansas politics today is marked by one-party legislative dominance and a political center that many voters feel has disappeared. Estabrook points to growing dissatisfaction across the electorate and the rightward shift of the state GOP. "We've seen… a MAGA revolution across the state where there's been a total change and no home for moderate Republicans any longer." United Kansas seeks to occupy that middle space, offering a coalition home for pragmatic Republicans, change-minded Democrats, and unaffiliated voters. Fusion voting is not new to Kansas — it was once central to its political development. Estabrook explains that in the late 19th century, farmers, labor groups, and reform movements discovered they could win power by nominating shared candidates. "[They] realized that if they all got together and nominated the same candidate, they would then have the numbers necessary to be victorious." These coalitions won legislative seats, the governorship, and congressional offices. Fusion was banned in 1901 after reform coalitions lost power, entrenching a two-party structure. United Kansas argues that restoring fusion would revive a historically normal democratic practice rather than introduce a novel experiment. Estabrook's journey into party-building grew from civic frustration and a desire for better solutions. "I was tired of the same solutions being offered, the two parties and not getting any different results." When the opportunity arose to create a new centrist party, he jumped in — helping gather signatures and build the organization. United Kansas officially qualified as a party in 2024 after submitting 35,000 signatures, far exceeding the required threshold. Creating a new party has meant grassroots organizing and constant relationship-building. "It's hard, it's grassroots, it's relational. You start with conversations and coffee shops and community events… and you explain the idea over and over." Estabrook notes that resistance rarely comes from everyday voters. "The resistance doesn't come from everyday voters. It comes from the entrenched systems that benefit the status quo." United Kansas quickly collided with Kansas' anti-fusion statutes when a candidate received both its nomination and a major-party nomination. State officials required the candidate to choose one line, triggering litigation. The movement argues that fusion bans violate political association rights and restrict voters' ability to express layered political identities. "Political association is protected speech… parties should be able to endorse who they choose [and] voters should be able to express layered political identities." The case is now before the Kansas Court of Appeals. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 24 in Topeka, with a ruling expected in the coming months. Watch the oral argument livestream at 10am CT on Tuesday.  Regardless of the outcome, the case is likely headed to the Kansas Supreme Court — meaning Kansas could soon become a key battleground in the national effort to restore fusion voting. Opponents often argue that third parties split votes or create confusion. Estabrook counters that fusion does the opposite: "Instead of splintering movements into spoiler candidates, it lets coalitions form around shared candidates." As for confusion, he notes that states like New York have used fusion voting successfully for decades. Despite national polarization, Estabrook finds encouragement in direct conversations with neighbors and community members. "Offering a solution that is something new… gives people hope." That sense of hope — grounded in relationships, coalition-building, and democratic renewal — sits at the heart of United Kansas and the broader fusion voting movement.   Recommended reading: United Kansas website: www.unitedkansas.com

    24 min

  5. JAN 28

    What Libertarians Should Get Right About Democracy (and Why It Matters Now)

    On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry sits down with Andy Craig — a libertarian election-policy expert whose career arc runs from the Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson's 2016 campaign to writing election-reform language that made it into the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022.  It's a wide-ranging and unusually candid conversation about how America's democratic breakdown looks from outside the red-blue binary — and why structural reform, not just partisan victory, is essential if liberal democracy is going to survive the Trump era. Craig, now an election-policy fellow at the Rainey Center and a contributing editor at The Unpopulist, describes January 6 as a turning point, not only politically but intellectually — a moment when democracy reform stopped being theoretical and became urgent: "This wasn't just some guy with policies I disagree with. This was a threat to the Republic." From that starting point, the conversation zeroes in on how America's winner-take-all electoral system fuels polarization and minority rule. Craig argues that the problem isn't simply Trump or MAGA, but the incentives baked into the system itself:  "Our electoral system has resulted in a kind of minority-rule dynamic — and that incentivizes more authoritarian measures."  One of the episode's most valuable contributions is Craig's explanation of how the two-party system systematically disenfranchises large portions of the electorate — not only third-party voters, but millions of people trapped in "safe" districts with no meaningful representation: "If you're in a safe Republican district or a safe Democratic district, you might be 30 or 40 percent of the vote — and you get no seat at the table."   Craig is not completely pessimistic. He sees some hope for the long-term recovery of American democracy.   "[T]here is a backlash to Trump. He won't be around forever. There will be a moment, I think, and we use the term reconstruction for it. And I think that's an appropriate analogy and framework. I mean, we're going to have to do a lot of rebuilding and retooling our institutions to make sure this doesn't happen again. And it's not going to be just returning to the status quo." The discussion moves beyond diagnosis to reforms that are often mentioned abstractly but rarely unpacked with this level of clarity: proportional representation, fusion voting, and the uniquely American role of state-run party primaries. Craig makes the case that these aren't fringe ideas, but practical tools — many achievable without constitutional amendments — for rebuilding a more representative and less brittle democracy. Equally striking is Craig's account of the libertarian movement's own fracture in the age of MAGA. There is a core disagreement, says Craig, between libertarians who gravitate toward "burn it all down" politics and others — including Craig and his colleagues at The Unpopulist — who came to see defending liberal democracy itself as the necessary foundation for any serious debate about policy. As Micah notes during the episode, this conversation maps a political space many Americans rarely hear articulated: socially liberal, institution-respecting, deeply alarmed by authoritarianism — and unsatisfied with a two-party system that repeatedly hands sweeping power to narrow factions. For anyone thinking seriously about how to get beyond our current democratic crisis — not just survive the next election — this episode is valuable listening.  RECOMMENDED READING  The Unpopulist: https://www.theunpopulist.net/

    32 min

  6. 12/17/2025

    What's brewing in Michigan?

    On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry sits down with Jeff Timmer—a veteran Republican strategist turned outspoken defender of democratic norms—for a conversation that is equal parts diagnosis, warning, and blueprint for reform. Timmer spent three decades inside the Republican Party, serving as executive director of the Michigan GOP and advising major campaigns, before becoming a senior figure at the Lincoln Project and co-founder of Republicans and Independents for Biden. What makes this episode especially compelling is that Timmer is not just naming the problem of democratic backsliding—he's proposing a concrete structural response.       "I just want to save democracy." Timmer embraces the label "Never Trumper," but he's clear that his break with today's GOP runs deeper than one individual. Trump, he argues, didn't invent the rot; he accelerated it. What was once a secular, chamber-of-commerce party drifted into a theologically driven and increasingly authoritarian force long before 2016. "The cancer has metastasized. There is no saving it," he said. Looking toward 2026 and 2028, Timmer warns that the United States may not experience genuinely free and fair elections—not through ballot-box fraud, but through intimidation and suppression.      "We are not going to have free and fair elections in this country in 2026 or 2028."  At the heart of the episode is Timmer's argument for fusion voting—an old but powerful reform that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate and aggregate their votes. TImmer explains, "Fusion voting is a way people can cast a protest vote without throwing their vote away."  So what are Timmer and other like-minded patriots brewing up in Michigan? Timmer is helping build Michigan's Common Sense Party, a centrist party with a single plank: protect the Constitution, the rule of law, and democracy.  Michigan may be the testing ground, but the implications arenational. Litigation to overturn fusion voting bans is underway or imminent in several states. Despite the gravity of his warnings, Timmer remains cautiously optimistic. "There are far more of us than there are of them—and we need to act like it." The challenge now is ensuring that when the public is ready to assert democratic values, our electoral system is capable of reflecting that will. RECOMMENDED LINKS: Jeff Timmer's podcast: "A Republic If You Can Keep it" https://a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it.blubrry.net/

    31 min

  7. 12/01/2025

    What is philanthropy getting right (and wrong) in the democracy space?

    This one should get people who care about philanthropy buzzing. In the latest episode of "This Old Democracy," host Micah Sifry and political scientist Daniel Stid have a provocative discussion about what philanthropy is getting right, and has gotten wrong, in the democracy space.   Stid is the former director of the Hewlett Foundation's U.S. Democracy Program and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He offers a candid and critical assessment of the state of American democracy and the often-unintended consequences of philanthropic engagement in the political sphere. Stid's view is that too much well-intentioned philanthropy has contributed to the hyper-polarization of American politics in the Trump era by funding advocacy for and against the administration. He argues that philanthropic funds have been (mis)used on both the right and the left: viz. Project 2025's governing agenda on one side, and the broad work to shape the electoral environment on the other.   Stid's most provocative argument is that the bulk of foundation spending—on highly visible issues like climate, criminal justice, or immigration—often funds advocates who "see no need to compromise and are pushing views that are really far outside the mainstream." This leads to a "tragedy of the commons," where actors doing what is "rational for them" (advancing their policy agenda) ultimately undermine the political system (the "commons") in which they operate. Stid encourages philanthropies to develop a deeper, "more holistic conception of democracy," highlighting the Our Common Purpose report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund). In the OCP report, you'll find some innovative thinking on strengthening both civil society institutions and individual citizens in their communities, as well as an argument on why our nation needs both. Advocates left and right will disagree with some of what Stid says. But for those who hold a simultaneous membership in Team Democracy, Stid gives you something to think about.  RECOMMENDED READING: Daniel Stid's must-read Substack: The Art of Association

    43 min

  8. 11/14/2025

    Can "Hollow Parties" Be Rejuvenated to Save American Democracy?

    In the "This Old Democracy" episode featuring political scientist Daniel Schlozman, host Micah Sifry dives into the structural weaknesses plaguing American politics, a central theme in The Hollow Parties, which Schlozman co-authored with Sam Rosenfeld. The core argument they make is that modern political parties are "hollow shells"—top-heavy, poorly rooted, and disconnected from the everyday lives of citizens, leading to a profound crisis of democracy. The conversation starts out with Schlozman and Sifry exploring the concept of movement anchors for political parties, and how that historically has worked for both major parties, albeit with different movement partners. For a long time, the Republican Party maintained a powerful alliance with the Christian Right and the Democratic Party had a robust anchor in organized labor. But Schlozman asserts that both movement anchors are much weaker now.  Amid this vacuum, Schlozman says that, "what Trump has done more effectively than Democrats is to take advantage of exactly the disorganization of civil society and figure out how to appeal to people who are not embedded in the same kinds of thick organizations, whereas Democrats have not done that." Sifry underlines Schlozman's conclusion saying, Trump " has intuited how to be what I think  Henry Timms referred to in his book on new power versus old power as the platform strongman." The conversation ultimately steers toward solutions, directly addressing the push for systemic change. While Schlozman expresses skepticism that a multi-party system (like the kind advocated by Lee Drutman) is a silver bullet—citing the transnational nature of anti-establishment populism and hollow parties all over the world—he is more optimistic about institutional reform at the state and local levels. He sees these "laboratories of democracy" as fertile ground for experimenting with alternatives, which could include reforms like proportional representation or fusion voting, that might foster more responsive and civically-rooted parties. The episode leaves listeners with a double-sided coin: Schlozman, who is first and foremost a political historian, argues that understanding history confirms that political actors can enact grand change for the better, but also that things can change for the worse. Ultimately, finding hope, he says, requires looking beyond the national "deep structural gloom" and embracing the hard, useful work of reforming our system from the ground up. Give it a listen to hear some smart thinking and some healthy skepticism from one of America's most important scholars of contemporary and comparative politics.

    35 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Hosted by Micah Sifry, This Old Democracy explores the ideas, movements and people working to rescue our faltering political system -- and rebuild American democracy on a stronger, more inclusive and truly representative foundation. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Center for Ballot Freedom, a cross-partisan nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy.

Information

  • Creator
    Micah Sifry
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    This Old Democracy

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