 Given the nature of this topic, you can think of this as sort of a collective therapy session where we're going to be diagnosing and treating what ails American democracy, but not to worry because we have a panel that's not only very distinguished, but they're all professionals. So we all know the problem of our increasingly dysfunctional political order. And in many ways, this is sort of the mother of all problems in public policy because it brings into question the basic functioning of our political order. It's paralyzing our ability to move forward on any number of issues, from guantanamo to gun control, from budgetary issues to healthcare issues, and also makes it more difficult for places like New America to succeed in our goal of injecting big new ideas into the political debate. So as we start grappling with this issue of our dysfunctional political order, I want to just start us off by highlighting one important paradox which lies at the heart of this issue. And you can understand this paradox by focusing on three key data points. First data point, there's academic research that reveals that Congress is now more polarized than at any time since the Civil War and Reconstruction. That's data point number one. Data point number two is that Congress is viewed less favorably now than at any time in recent history. And now put that in context with point number three. Data point number three is that the American electorate itself is actually no more polarized than it was in the 1970s. A third of Americans, roughly, define themselves as independents. So we have this odd paradox where our Congress is supposed to represent and moderate the passions of the public, but yet we're in this new reality where our elected officials are actually far more polarized than the electorate that they represent. And we see this play out on all kinds of issues, take, for example, gun control. Data suggests that 90% of Americans favored the idea of background checks, but yet Congress can bring itself to pass this. So we see this on issue after issue, and it suggests that there's a profound set of structural factors that are rendering our politics not only ungovernable but hyperpartisan. So we have this really exceptional panel that Rachel put together, and she gets all credit for this. And collectively what we're going to try to do is understand why has our system become so dysfunctional and most importantly focus in on solutions. How can we actually fix this problem? And as we tackle the solutions, I'd encourage you to think through the tension between the solutions that can be implemented within the current political order and those that actually require us to change the rules of the game, between what we can do within the system or changing the system. So we're going to start with Peter. And Peter has volunteered to put this all in political context. I should say a little bit about the background. Peter first and foremost is a New America senior fellow. We tried to recruit him as a New America fellow in the very early years of the foundation, but he was busy being the editor of the New Republic at the time. Finally we got him and we're thrilled. He also has a day job, which you'll see listed. Now Peter, the question to you is are things really, from a historic perspective, are things really that bad? What does our current era compare to in terms of precedence and what can history teach us about the way out of this mess? So I think it would be a lot more interesting to say things are not that bad just because given like Ryan, I'm a former New Republic person, I always look for the contrary answer even if it's not true. But I actually think that the conventional boring answer that things are very bad is true. We have to start with the fact, this is very obvious, but we don't have a parliamentary system. So we don't have a system in which winning a presidential election allows you to enact your agenda. Everything that happens in American politics, legislatively, has happened because of bipartisan compromise. A presidential election can shape the terms of that compromise, but it can't relieve you of the responsibility to compromise with the other party. In the way in a parliamentary system you could. You would have control of the legislative branch and the executive branch, they're one. You just go push things through on a party line vote. You can't do that, there's just too much of an opportunity for even a fairly weak minority party as we can see to gum up the works. We are in an era in which bipartisan compromise is very difficult and very unusual and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the parties are so polarized, that this whole species of people who were moderate and liberal Republicans from the north and conservative Democrats from the south, which meant that they were cross-pressured, right? They were on the one hand had to appeal to be in the mainstream of their national party, but they also had to be in the mainstream of their region, which meant that naturally for their own political survival compromise was the best solution, those people are completely extinct in Congress. National Journal found that for the first time ever now, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate is still more liberal than the most liberal Republican. When I'm old enough to remember, when I was in college, especially because I come from the northeast, I can remember several elections in which the Democrat was more conservative than the Republican. I can remember that in my lifetime. When Joe Lieberman ran against Lowell Weicker for the Senate in Connecticut, Lieberman ran to his right. When John Silver ran against Bill Weld for the governor of Massachusetts, Silver was the more conservative as a Democrat. I remember conservative Democrats in Massachusetts for my youth. They don't exist anymore. And I actually don't think this is just a Washington phenomena. I actually think this is a national phenomenon. There was a big study that Pew did last year. They compared 2012 to 1987. And what they found was that the country was not more polarized between black and white, rich and poor, religious and secular, young and old, but it was twice as polarized between Democrats and Republicans. And interestingly, and I think this might be an interesting point of argument, when they added in independence, the polarization remained because they found that the independence were not real independence. The vast majority of them were heavily leaning towards Democrats and Republicans, and when they added those people in, the polarization remained. So what's happened? I think there's a danger of seeing, because there's been polarization, assuming that it's equidistance between the two parties. I think if you look into the numbers, that's not the story. There's not equidistance between the two parties. It's not the Democratic Party hasn't changed at all since the 1980s. It has changed in one significant respect. It's become more secular. And that does express itself on cultural issues. So for instance, Pew found that if you ask Democrats to say whether they agreed with the statement, I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage. Democrats are 26 points less likely today than they were in 1987 to say yes to that. That if you ask them to say this on the statement, I never doubt the existence of God that white Democrats have dropped are 17 points more likely to say they doubt the existence of God. So the Democratic Party has moved and become more secular. And you can see the way this plays itself out on gay rights, maybe on abortion rights where the anti-abortion wing of the Democratic Party is shriveled. But I don't think it's nearly as significant as the Republican shift. And the Republican shift has been a massive shift towards utter and complete hostility to the federal government. And the statistics are really quite remarkable. When they asked in 1987, do you support stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment? 86% of Republicans said yes. The divide between Republicans and Democrats was not that great. 93% of Democrats said yes in 1987. The Democratic number is exactly the same today. The Republican number has dropped almost 40 points. So that the Democrats and Republican distance was very small in 87. And now it is massive. That's 50 points today. Similarly, should government take care of those who can't take care of themselves? The Democrats haven't moved since 1987. They're basically 75% say yes, the government should take care of it. But the Republicans have dropped 22 points. So the Republican Party is much more anti-government than it was in the era of Ronald Reagan. And you see that in Washington in many ways, that many people who were mainstream Republicans, not low, white, or liberal Republicans, but mainstream Republicans. John Danforth, Richard Luger, James Baker, Chuck Hagel, Colin Powell, John Huntsman, those people are essentially considered rhinos now. They're essentially considered basically liberals who pretend to be Republicans. You can see it in the fact that even in conservative states, what it means to be a conservative senator has become more and more extreme. Kay Bailey Hutchinson was once considered a conservative senator. Then John Cornyn came along and made her look comparatively like a moderate. And now Cornyn looks like a moderate compared to Ted Cruz. So you see this escalating move towards the definition of what it means to be a Republican. Nate Silver found that of the 27 most moderate Republican senators in 2007, only six are left in the Senate. So there's been just a collapse in those people. And I think you see it in the language, the fact that it is so common to describe, to call socialist, positions that were once not only mainstream American positions, but mainstream Republican positions, so is you where the Republican Party has gone. The fact that when Barack Obama put up a health care bill that had a lot of similarities to some of the health care proposals that Republicans had put up, he got virtually no Republican support. Now it's tempting to say that the Democrats and, of course, institutionally you see this expressed by the filibuster, right? It's not enough to simply oppose something. To oppose something now means you filibuster it, including nominations. And it's tempting to say that Democrats did exactly the same thing. But I actually think they didn't do exactly the same thing under George W. Bush. I mean, if you think about how much big bipartisan stuff came out of the Bush administration with Democratic votes, not all of it good, but the 2001 tax cuts, the Iraq war, no child left behind, the Patriot Act, the financial bailouts, you can see the Democrats were willing to support some significant number of them. Actually a lot of big stuff. And I don't think it's been the same in the Obama era. So what do you do about this? I think that there are two kinds of answers, it seems to me. The one are changes in process, right? And there are lots of interesting ideas out there. You could allow independents to vote in the primaries, or you could allow Democrats to vote in Republican primaries, right? And vice versa to give moderates a better chance of winning primaries. You can try to get rid of gerrymandering of districts. You can try to make voting easier. You can all things to empower people who are less partisan and more moderate. You can try to make it harder to filibuster. I'm really skeptical of this stuff for this basic reason. I don't think anyone cares about process. I really don't. I really think that most people care about process because they want an outcome. And nobody's kidding anyone. Everybody knows that what that outcome that people are trying to change the process to get to is. And so by and large, I think these process things tend to be people who are not happy where the Republican Party is and trying to move it in a different direction. And I don't think for that reason process changes are likely to get through. We may need them, but they're not likely to happen for the same reason that we need them, which is to say that they will produce a different outcome. And people who are invested in being ferociously opposed to the federal government don't want to change that outcome. I think the more likely hopeful vehicle for change is more simple. It's for the Republicans to lose in 2016. I think if you look at, historically, you find that losing two presidential elections in a row makes you unhappy, but it doesn't make you unhappy, you know, the stages of grief and loss. It doesn't bring you to the point where you're willing to make really, really painful change. The Democratic Leadership Council started after Walter Mondale lost in 84, after the Democrats lost twice. But they weren't really willing to fight the hard battles with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party until the loss of, after Dukakis lost in 1988. It took three losses. And I think that for the Republican Party to rethink some of these things, it's going to take a third political loss. If there is a historical analogy, I think the most interesting, maybe the best historical analogy would be the interwar years. When people look at the grand bipartisan achievements that they wish we could recreate today, they're basically talking about the end of World War II until the 1970s. This is what Ron Brownstein is called the age of bargaining, right? That's the, you know, that's when we had civil rights and the interstate highway system, Medicare, Marshall Plan, food safety and public health expansion, all of these things. But I think it's important to remember that that age of bargaining really began when Eisenhower became the Republican nominee in 1952 instead of Taft. It's when the Taft wing of the Republican Party, which was ferociously anti-government and had been ever since World War I. When it was forced by, of course, partly being wrong on World War II, but realizing that it couldn't overturn the New Deal, that's when the age of bargaining began. And so I think in some ways if that's, there's maybe an interesting analogy there between what happened to the Republican Party when it finally realized it couldn't defeat the New Deal. And it's interesting, just intellectually, if you think about where the right is today, there's been this huge resurgence of interest in the interwar years, right? Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, Amity Slays, all of this resuscitating of coolage, attacks on the progressives, attacks on the New Deal. And I think the Republican Party has gone back to having a love affair with an interwar period. I think the best possible thing that would happen would be for them to realize that that love affair, that return to hostility to the New Deal and to the progressive era is destroying them politically and for them to go through a new version of what happened when Eisenhower became the Republican nominee and made peace with the New Deal. And then I think some of these process things might take care of themselves. Thanks very much. Thank you, Peter. That was terrific. And you can see why we wanted to recruit him as a fellow for a long time. Next, we go to Maya. Maya is president of the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget. She's also the former director of fiscal policy of the New America Foundation and was one of the first staffers and program directors at New America. So we share many fond memories. But more recently, she has been in the trenches working probably harder than anybody in Washington to forge a bipartisan budget deal. And so, Maya, what we're asking of you on this panel is your perspective as an insider fighting the good fight every day. What does it feel like? What are the obstacles? What are the opportunities? What depresses you? What gives you hope? And what do you see as the solution is going forward? OK, thank you very much. And I think I'm about to be a really frustrating panelist because I know one of the things I find the most frustrating is when someone on a panel doesn't have good solutions. And I feel like this is one of the single biggest problems facing the country right now. It certainly is a source of frustration in the issues I'm dealing with and fiscal policy, but clearly it's well beyond that. And everybody feels it in a variety of issues. And yet, and this is how, Ted, I remember when we were first at New America, we would go around the table at all these retreats and say, what do you think is the biggest problem facing the country? And we would all put those out on the table and then we'd have discussions about what to do with them and we would generate neat new ideas that would kind of be the cores of our programs and the writing of the fellows. And I'm at that point on this one where I just don't know what the solutions are and none of them feel right, but I don't think we get very far until we start working on some new creative solutions. I do kind of turn to some of the process things which are old and tired but believing that they're necessary in terms of campaign finance reform and redistricting. I don't think that they will fix everything on their own, but I think they are 100% broken and have to be addressed. And I also, just to throw out, because it's a safe New America space for crazy big new ideas, but something in the back of my head that I keep thinking about is there should be a moment where, with technology, which is kind of the democratization of ideas, we start to change the need in the role of parties overall. That if we're all having more access to the direct ideas and policy ideas, maybe the notion that you have a two-party system or parties that kind of do a lot of your thinking for you will become obsolete. But that's not going to happen anytime soon. So maybe between those two ideas of kind of dry process that we've been talking about for two decades and blowing up the whole system is kind of a nice possible path forward. On what I experienced with this, I guess I think, you know, there's lots of problems in Washington. Power is one of them. Money is one of them. One of the biggest frustrations that I have is when you think about how you get bipartisanship and you need that more on a fiscal issue than a lot, just because the kinds of things we're going to be doing are so awful. You know, it's the policies that nobody likes, cutting, spending, and raising taxes. So if and whenever we do come up with a budget deal that has all of those things in it, you'll have to have significant bipartisan buy-in so that there's cover and so that people don't try to undo that immediately as soon as it's passed. And it starts pretty easy. This has been our experience. We worked with a core group of senators, for instance, who are bought into the notion that you needed a big debt deal. But as soon as they became sort of known for this, they were either the moderates to begin with or they became seen as the moderates. And so they stopped carrying weight with the extremes of their party. And so then we thought, okay, well, here's what we need to do. We need to, you know, broaden our group of two or four, six out and get some of the people who are more on the extreme ends of both of the parties. And what it's turned into sort of eyewitnesses is that once anybody buys into that and talks about the need for bipartisanship and actually talks about some of the specific policies, so in this case, a Democrat who talks about entitlement reforms, a Republican who talks about raising taxes, as soon as they do that, the side of the party, the extremes of the party that we were hoping they would bring in the middle, they've lost their cred. They no longer can do that. So it's sort of like you make the extreme people talk, as soon as they become reasonable, they don't help you with the not reasonable sides. And there becomes a space for more extreme people on both sides to kind of come in. And I'll tell you, that's happened both with members of Congress and it's also happened with kind of the political intellectual leaders who influenced those parties. And I probably won't point out who those people are, but I've kind of experienced this more on the right with the actual members. So whenever any Republican senators start talking about revenues, they immediately get the, what is it, my primary, there's a group that's gonna primary any Republican who talks about revenues. Sorry, what's the- Club for Growth. The Club for Growth. And so the members start to either lose their willingness to talk about these issues or lose their credibility with other members. On the left, what happens is a lot of the kind of real leaders from the think tank world will start talking about some of the harder issues. And then they get beaten up by kind of the intellectual or policy crowd and they lose their credibility with the members of Congress. So it is a really difficult poll to keep getting people into a spot where they're publicly willing to compromise. I hosted a dinner the other night with about 12 members of Congress and I started off talking about something and one member who'd never come to any of our dinners before just raised his hand and said, isn't compromise what got us into these fiscal problems in the first place? And I thought, oh boy, this is not gonna be the crowd. Like this is, I'm used to people sort of nodding at compromises being a good thing. I don't think you see that as often anymore. A lot of times you have a lot of people on both sides saying actually compromises the problem and so we're not gonna work on that. I also think that right now when I think about the different issues, you've got guns, you've got immigration, you've got all sorts of things. A lot of the members who we're working with feel like they've got one hard vote. They can kind of push against their party on one place and then they have to prove that they are truly a Democrat or truly a Republican, all of the other votes. And so instead of what some of us had talked about months ago which is can you sort of get some progress in one issue and then that spills over and the Senate remembers what it's actually like to function a little bit and they like it and so then they maybe work and cooperate on something else and they get another legislative accomplishment. It feels like there's only one bit of compromise space for that and that's a little bit troubling. So then all of us who are working on our different issues are kind of pushing to get up on the agenda, like how do I squeeze past immigration? How do they squeeze past guns? That's not a functioning system either, I would point out. So those are my personal observations are that and then I guess I would just add one which is the power structure. I mean, I grew up in Washington D.C. I had never had any members of Congress so I always felt a little frustrated with that but now as I'm a member of the state because I live one block into Maryland, I think a lot about how we're not represented equally when you look at the power of your member. So if you have a member who's in leadership or if you have a member who's trying to buck leadership, it's incredibly different amount of influence that they wield. And the bottom line is that people at the top now, the leaders of the parties hold a ton of power both in terms of positions and in terms of money and I feel like that's further kind of moving us away from democracy and more towards the consolidation of parties and the two extremes. So again, I'm really hoping that on this panel I get to a point where I can say this is what I think we should do. I do think it feels like the middle of the story of developing these ideas but in terms of working on passing policies, I don't think it would nearly have been this frustrating 10 years ago. I wasn't as involved at all but you look at the people who are involved in these same issues, it functioned so much better and people went through the acts of disagreeing and they knew they had a job to get done and that was more important and at this point it feels far, far more important to kind of stay true to the extremes and compromise becomes seen as bad in a lot of different situations. Thank you Maya, that was great. Let me just ask one very quick follow up question. So when you're working closely with the members in private, off the record, what do they tell you? Do they tell you, I hate this, I wanna get back to a prior era where we can be more deliberative, where we can work more together or have they actually internalized all of the animosity between the two sides? Well, it's probably not safe to generalize too much so with that caveat I will. The House and the Senate are extremely different bodies and I think the Senate feels like that. I know that sort of, I sometimes see people walking in the halls and the Senate literally kind of slumped over and it feels like a broken body to me. It feels like a lot of people. Not really old. Well, no, even the young ones, look at the younger ones, they're starting to slump to it, a much too early age. It is an old body but they're slumping and it just feels to me like a lot of people who came here who wanted to do good work. I don't think any of them are going home at the end of the day feeling like I really did a great job at the office and I think that that's bothering them. The House feels very different to me. The House feels like it's younger, there's more turnover. There's a lot of turnover in both bodies right now. I just heard the numbers the other day and I forget what they were but they were shocking sort of how little institutional knowledge there is in the bodies and how many new people have come in recently but the House is filled with more true believers on both sides. They are more extreme, they are true believers. When I come in and give my nice feel good message of let's all hold hands and jump off the cliff together, that is, it's not very well received in a lot of parties and pieces and it feels like it's moving more in that direction. In the Senate by the way, the number of retirements are at all time record levels. Let's go to Jonathan next. So Jonathan is a board member of New America. We're very proud to have him on board. By day he runs an investment management company but his real passion is political reform. He's the co-founder of the Friends of Democracy Super PAC but he's a deep thinker on the type of structural reforms that are needed. This is why we sat him next to Maya so Maya could give us one perspective and say, I don't know about the solutions. Well, Jonathan is here to talk about structural fixes to the problem at hand. Well, I'm not sure how helpful I'm gonna be to Maya. I'll actually start with a comment that Peter ended up with which is that people don't care about process. So I am one of those people who care about process and I can tell you it's true. It's a really lonely business. They're not a lot of people who care deeply about it and so I'd start with two points. The one is, and you hinted at this in your introduction, that if you wanna think about changing the rules, it is exceedingly difficult to do. It's exceedingly difficult because, and also some things that Peter said, because there is typically a political outcome and generally speaking, the political outcome will overwhelm whatever impetus is to think about sort of a better process. The second is that once you think about doing it extremely carefully and that actually the unintended consequences of reform are often as bad as the intended reform. You see that now in, you don't necessarily see it, but you see it in some responses to the redistricting question that you take different versions of how you deal with that whether it's open primers, they create different problems of their own. The field of my particular passion right now is money and politics and you can look at an unintended consequence in that which is we have our contribution limits, our $2,600 now for federal candidates, $5,200, but it still costs millions of dollars to run a campaign. So as an unintended consequence of that effort to limit the role of money and politics, you've actually created a system that effectively maximizes the amount of time candidates spend with rich people, right? They have to spend 30 estimates or 30 to 70% of their time fundraising and they raise it from an incredibly narrow slice of the population. It's less than one half of 1% of the population gives even a registered amount of money to a political campaign. So one of my principal focuses is thinking about actually how do you get changed on? There's not a shortage of ideas. There's really open questions about which ideas are good ones and others. And I think in that it's worth trying to divide them a little bit between issues that challenge our fundamental notions of fairness in our democracy that is say things where the democracy is failing to live up to its expectations as we understand them. And in that I would put the question of money and politics where you end up with a small portion of the population having enormous influence and totally out of balance influence over the process. Voting just the bear active voting and voting restrictions which offends a fundamental notion that everyone should be entitled to cast a ballot. There were and then all the variants of that not just the voter ID controversy from last year but just voter registration as a concept which emerged over 100 years ago as a design to make it harder for poor and transient people to vote continues to have that effect. So Census study I think was related to the 2008 election suggested that somewhere up to 6 million people couldn't cast their ballot because of the missed deadlines or the complying with deadline. So that's one of those issues that sort of challenges our fundamental notions of fairness. And then you get a bunch of issues. You mentioned we don't have a parliamentary system as your first comment. Well that's actually a fundamental issue which is a design issue about what is it? How is it we've designed these structures? Maya you made a comment about parties and the role of parties. Again both a substantive but also a design question of how do we think that political expression can be engaged. And I think those are even harder questions to deal with because they both have a tend to have a political outcome and they don't have a clear answer. One system is not definitively better than the other and again it's very hard to take a moment in time where we think our politics is dysfunctional and say well we should change it this way and that'll make it better. Well although there may not be a lot of people who say I'm going home doing a great job for some folks the politics is perfectly functional. If your objective is to effectively shut down the federal government you're doing a pretty good job. And so what is it we want to get out of our politics and those questions around what do we think a deliberative democratic process should look like are really really hard and they just simply are nearly impossible to engage. I mean just as a separate note on that I personally think that the old Jeffersonian notion that we should have a constitutional convention every 20 years is not, I think it was 20 right. It was not a bad way. At least it forces you to address those questions because otherwise you have no impetus to do so. The other, those first ones are the ones that I tend to focus on which is the structural impediments to fairness in our democracy. And I do think that there is at least the possibility. I didn't mention redistricting which I should which I think bridges between those two. So there actually has been, there's an element of redistricting that touches on that fundamental fairness question which is people who are whom we are electing are choosing their voters rather than vice versa. They're designing districts so that they have a particular set of voters to elect them. There's been some, you know, there's been some advance on that. California passed a couple of initiatives first for their state legislature then for congressional around an independent commission that would write those lines. Iowa has had an independent commission for a long time. That, you can get to that part of it but there's a fundamental issue around structure again which is we choose to elect our representatives in single member districts. And so we think that redistricting is a problem that creates this sort of imbalance in our politics but in fact there have been various studies that suggest there's a natural bias towards, you know, towards non-competitive districts if you wrote your districts in the fairest way possible following geographic boundaries because there's a natural segregation in the population. There's concentration of urban democratic voters and there's a spread out of other voters in rural and ex-urban districts. And so there's a natural divide that happens just with the way that the population is divided. And so if you wanna get to competition in our general elections, you don't actually get very far with faire redistricting. You might wanna, and we like to talk about instant runoff voting, you and I as one alternative to that. But then on the other two, the money in politics won, again, exceedingly difficult to think about both because there is political consequence or the idea of political consequence. But also because with any of these rules, even if there wasn't an idea that there's a partisan or electoral consequence, you're dealing with the rules by which they got elected. And so change itself is a dangerous thing for somebody who's a sitting representative because they know, everybody says they hate the current system, right? But they know how it works, right? They all got there under it. And once you get there, it gets more and more comfortable. And so if you take those two of money in politics and sort of broader voting reform, I actually think the prospects of success, hard as they are on money in politics, is much greater. And the reason for that, one is there's a broad-based disgust across the public polls that are consistent. People don't trust their government. They don't believe that their representatives are working for them. That's a nonpartisan allocation of distrust. I mean, you can't get to 90% and not be touching everybody. So there's a broad distrust. And as a political matter, and this is the work that we were engaged with, with Friends of Democracy, you can actually attach money in politics to those other more salient issues that people rank higher, so education and jobs and security and healthcare. And actually any idea, any message that you wanna put forward about that and about your opponent gets much more powerful when you attach a, oh, and they took this money from these people and then they voted that way, because you're dealing with the underlying trust in government, the underlying trust in the candidate that they're gonna represent you, and that is the fundamental basis for an election. So that's the work we're doing. It's gonna take a long time to do, but there is at least a political methodology from getting to place A to place B. The core voting rights stuff is, I think, even harder than that, because it's very hard to put that in a context that has, other than this broad fairness, it's hard to take it out of its partisan element. And so I've advocated with former fellow Mark Schmidt, who, I'm not sure if he's here today, we put out an article recently calling for a constitutional right to vote amendment, where if you can lift the issue actually above the partisan frame, tap into that question of fundamental fairness, because we all think that we have the right to vote. The Supreme Court has sort of said it in reading the Constitution, but the Constitution doesn't actually provide it. And if it did provide it, it would erase some of the ability to create these limitations on voting that we are otherwise fighting on a very partisan basis. And so, some hopeful notes on maybe long term how you can get some of these things, but I don't know that it solves the underlying sort of what we call dysfunction in the system itself. It just changes the trust and the confidence that we have that the process is actually reflective of voters. Thank you, Jonathan. Next up is Ryan, who's a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and by far one of the most insightful political journalists out there today. I did something very rude to him as a moderator, which is that about three hours before the session I tried to reassign his topic and say, hey, be nice if somebody talked about technological solutions to this problem. And Ryan nicely wrote back and said, not sure there are any. So that being the case, why don't you just go forth for a couple of minutes about your perspective on this issue, looking forward to the coming election cycle, but also helping us out on solutions to the problem at hand. Well, yeah, thank you. The disadvantage of going last, of course, is that anything interesting you thought you had to say is probably already been said. But let me, you know, these panels on Washington dysfunction, I always feel like they should be called, you know, why Barack Obama, how could a guy as smart as Barack Obama have gotten things so wrong, right? I mean, the whole premise of Obama from his convention speech in 2004 up through his 2008 victory was that the problem we're discussing here today either didn't exist or could be overcome simply by, he didn't really specify, but that he would be the person that would magically make gridlock and polarization go away. And I always thought he hasn't been criticized enough for just being a bad political scientist, right? The 30 years of political history that preceded Barack Obama, there's one single just ginormous trend that everyone in politics and political science talks about, and that is the two parties growing apart and becoming more homogenous. As Peter points out, Republicans going further to the right than the Democrats, but still the Democrats moving leftward. And I think because of that problem, because we all recognize that problem, Obama tapped into our frustrations with it, right? When he made that famous speech in 2004 that there are not red states and they're not blue states, there's the United States of America and made us all feel pretty good. And on the eve of his election, what in 2009 when he gets into office, also as Peter pointed out, you had a house of representatives where there was no middle, the middle was gone. The most conservative Democrat was further to the left than the most liberal Republican, same thing in the Senate. And yet he still clung to this hope that he could overcome that. One of my favorite stories about that is in 2009, he had this dinner. Remember this dinner he had at George Will's house, he invited all the conservative columnists and he used a quote there that he liked to use back then. He said that in American politics, things are played on the 40 yard lines, not near the end zones. And I think what the last few years have shown us is that that was just 100% wrong. American politics, this panelist about why is there gridlock in Washington? There's gridlock in Washington because Democrats and Republicans don't agree on any issues, I think it's as simple as that. And I would take issue with one thing you said, Ted, about there being polarization in Congress, but not necessarily polarization reflected in the voting population. And that's one of these fiercely contested issues in political science these days. I think the evidence now is on the side of the folks who say, you know what, polarization in the house and Senate is simply a reflection of what's going on in America. That is that voters are deeply divided on these issues and that this issue of independence being a third or whatever it is, part of the population is very deceiving. It's just a function of people not wanting to say they're Democrats or Republicans, but when you actually press them on the issues, they have the same views on any of the cultural issues or excuse me, they align with Democrats or Republicans very reliably on any of the cultural issues or the size and scope of the government or any of the issues that divide the parties. And so if it's something you ask, okay, so how over these last 30 years did the country become so polarized? What changed? And how can you overcome that? The best explanation I've seen about the root cause of polarization is what you were getting at with your explanation of why gerrymandering isn't gonna fix this or changing gerrymandering isn't gonna fix this problem. In Washington, gerrymandering is like the end all be all, right, you say fix gerrymandering or fix all the problems. Turns out gerrymandering has nothing to do with it. The reason the country is polarized is because we have physically sorted ourselves into enclaves of liberals and conservatives. Any of you are familiar with the book by Bill Bishop? What is it, The Great Sword? The Big Sword. You know, he gets at this, he got at this a few years ago quite well and there's more recent evidence of this. Alan Abramowitz at Emory recently wrote a paper where he looked at the 76 election and the 2012 election. So Carter's victory in 76, he wins by two points, Obama in 2012 wins by what, four points. So similar elections, neither one was a landslide election, but you go down and look at the state level data. In 76, there were 20 states that were basically close, there were basically 20 swing states in 1976, less than five points decided those states. Only 10 states that were landslide elections, only 10 states where the election was decided by 15 points or more. Fast forward to 2012, the number of swing states, four. Four states that, where it was actually close and the number of landslide states was 27. You look at similar data for the House of Representatives, it's even more dramatic than that. You don't, you just, it's all landslide house races. And so you look at the county level data like Bishop did in that book, The Big Swords, and you see the same trend. A lack of landslide counties back in 76, many, many more today. So I always think that Obama's goal to overcome polarization in Washington was just, it was insane. I mean, unless he was going to relocate people and make all of the states more purple unless red and blue, that just wasn't going to happen. And ironically, the major political trend of the Obama years has been that the red states have gotten redder and the blue states have gotten bluer. He was wrong in 2004. Look at the, so how can you have a functioning system in Washington? The answer that most people don't want to hear is partisan dominance, right? Our system, when it was created, as you guys have alluded to, did not, it did not foresee a really important political development, parties. And it wasn't meant to, it was not meant to work properly in the current environment of polarization. And so we had a really, really robust period of legislative action relatively recently. Remember 2009, 2010? We had a big stimulus bill passed. We had a Wall Street reform. We had a pretty significant healthcare bill passed. Education reform, whole slew of things in 2009, 2010. Why? Because Democrats controlled everything in this town and they could push things through. Look at other, if you want to look at other examples of government functioning in America, right now we have 36 states that are under one party control. So the governor's mansion and the state house are all under one party control. Look at what's happening in those states. They're passing lots of legislation. I was just in Colorado looking at this phenomenon. And in one session they have passed civil unions. They've implemented a voter initiative to legalize, to set up a system for legalizing marijuana. They've done, they're doing some stuff on fracking and some other local issues. They've passed some of the most the strictest gun laws in the country. In New York Cuomo's doing something similar. In Maryland, O'Malley's doing something. That's all on the Democratic side. In the red states where you have a similar, actually more states that are controlled strictly by Republicans, you're seeing an incredible burst of legislation moving in exactly the opposite direction. So, while things are divided and polarized in Washington, where you have one party with a single ideology, things are able to move. Now, that's not a great answer because most people would like to see Washington operate in a more consensus fashion where both parties get something and give something. What could you do to fix that? I mean, the two solutions that you all are familiar with are relatively simple parliamentary changes where you would have a damn bursting open of legislation. Get rid of the filibuster in the Senate so you don't have a 60-vote supermajority which was never intended by the founders when they wrote the Constitution or they would have written it into the document. And in the House, you could change the way that the majority works and make sure that the minority could force things to the floor. There's a slew of legislation that would pass the House of Representatives right now if it would just make it to the floor. So those two very simple fixes would change things quite a bit. And then just to, on a note of optimism, we have an experiment right now going on in this town with bipartisan consensus legislation that keeps not failing for one reason or another and that is immigration reform. And so it might be worth thinking through what are the political dynamics that got this gang of eight senators together to fashion a bill that neither Republicans nor Democrats think is perfect but keeps sort of moving through the process. I mean, I was up there at this markup the other day. Usually markups are not very interesting and they're strictly partisan affairs but something incredible happened last week at the markup of that immigration bill. Senator Jeff Flake, very conservative senator from Arizona and Lindsey Graham, a fairly conservative senator from South Carolina who's actually up for reelection next year, they sat there and on vote after vote of certain amendments, they voted with their Democratic colleagues to protect this very fragile compromise. Now, if you read some of the reports this week, the Democrats, it's gonna be their turn to do this on that committee over a couple of issues including how to treat same-sex couples in this immigration bill. If you wanna look for, there's something about the dynamics of that process that might give us some lessons and maybe Maya for the issues that you're pushing, you know, looking at why that's working when everything has seemed so dysfunctional. Thank you, Ryan, for your note of optimism. It does seem that the exception to the rule right now and that that's largely driven by both parties recognition of the importance of the Latino vote. So there's something in it for both parties. Ryan gave us a couple interesting reforms from within the current system. I wanna talk for a minute about reforms outside. Peter suggested that there are some important process solutions and Jonathan followed up and saying that they're neither popular nor necessarily passable. But let's for a moment separate what ought to be from what can be and just talk about what an optimal solution structurally would look like. And I just wanna see if we can possibly have any mild consensus on the panel. So it does seem that one of the factors driving hyperpartisan dynamics in Washington is the way in which the structure of primaries concentrates the extremes. So do we all agree that that's a major factor that the Tea Party, for instance, uses the primary process to basically veto any moderates and as a result has a lock on their party's candidates. So my question is if we were to implement any number of solutions that would weaken or do away with the ability of the extremities to play the primary process. For example, eliminating the primary process or creating open primaries or the type of instant runoff voting that Jonathan briefly mentioned. So just question one, does the panel agree that if in some hypothetical world we could actually enact those changes we would end up with a more reasonable political order? So just one thing, I think you have to set some parameters, right? Cause you're saying within the structure again of single member districts where you're voting for one person. But within that structure, the reform that I think is most meaningful is the instant runoff voting, which has to be combined together with reasonable ballot access so you can actually get, cause we also need to think about the way in which the parties have designed control over the electoral process by making it really hard to get on the ballots at the state level, making it really hard to compete in any other way than through a party. So you need to think about that. But the way the instant runoff voting works for those who aren't familiar with it is you have multiple candidates on a ballot and you are able to rank order your preference for them. And when you take the first scan, so you have one election, you rank all the candidates, take scan, the person with the least votes drops off and then the votes of that that would have otherwise gone to that candidate go to the second choice of each of those folks. And each time you drop somebody off, you get closer and closer to somebody having an absolute majority of the vote. And so what it allows is, it allows a form of political expression to exist without being a spoiler. So candidates can run from all parts of the political spectrum. And in theory, you end up with the candidate who has effectively the consensus of the majority of the population, the person that in the aggregate they would most like to have as a majority represent them. And so it does a way to some degree if a party decides to nominate somebody who is otherwise a fringe candidate to their district, that person will be defeated by somebody to the center. That's the... So it opens up the process to third parties solving the spoiler problem which now prevents third parties from going anywhere. The reason that I'm mildly optimistic is because unlike much of what we think of as legislation in the country where the focus of power is in Washington, electoral rules are set at the state and local level. So let's say there were a massive campaign to promote open primaries or what have you. That could be played out in the laboratories of democracy. In other words, you don't have to wait for change to happen in Washington. You can pan this out across all the states, even in small localities. So there was an example of this. You'll all recall the Schwarzenegger experiment. Well, he would never have been elected governor of California were not for the recall of Gray Davis which created a unique circumstance. Why? Because he never would have won the Republican primary. But in essence you had, you did away with the primary process because of the unique circumstances of that recollection. And it gave us whatever one thinks of Schwarzenegger, he was a moderate pragmatic Republican in an otherwise largely democratic state. I find hope in that. I don't know if my other panelists do too. But let's open up to group discussion. Is Mike Lind in the room? Yes. Michael Lind, good friend of mine, is also a deep thinker on questions of political reform. So Michael, can you just add your two cents and then we'll broaden it out to the whole crowd? Can you hear me? I'm just going to reinforce what you said. I think if you have campaign finance alone but you continue to have this archaic electoral system whether it's for choosing the candidates in separate primaries or in the general election then for the reasons Jonathan pointed out you have this natural geographic distribution of people and you tend to have the danger when new ideas are introduced into the political spectrum whether it's by movements like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or even by third parties that you will end up electing, splitting the voters who are closest to your position. And you can get people who represent a very small minority of a district or a state in a three or four way race can then prevail. And that's the reason why most democracies have abandoned our first pass the post plurality system. It's just a few English speaking countries maintain it including Britain by the way where Margaret Thatcher received a minority of the vote during her entire term as prime minister but nevertheless was elected and reelected because the opposition was divided. So I would just second the support for instant runoff voting and Ted you're quite right. A lot of this stuff can be done at the state level and you don't have to wait for Washington to do it necessarily. Thank you. Let's open up to questions please. If we could get a microphone in the front that would be wonderful otherwise scream loudly. Thank you for this. My name is Lorelai Kelly. I'm at the Open Technology Institute looking at Congress. I'm wondering if you could think about something that combines sort of institutional processes which is just as bad as being a process geek as being an institutional geek and the new transparency rules which bring technology into Congress in a new way because it busts up time and space that when I worked on the Hill one of the things that was really possible all the time was to use institutional processes to blunt the extremes by helping groups who have unspent political capital and right now there's a really interesting thing going on in the informal sector of Congress which is the formation of new caucuses and more symmetrical knowledge sharing. You could just put it like that for cybersecurity and other issues that don't fit into the committee system because it's set up to reflect the last century. So one of the groups that I always find not organized is retiring members. They can blow through their political capital and they love the institution in a way that new people don't. And I went and read all the bios of the new freshman class. And there's a lot of potential there for systems thinking. And I'm wondering Maya especially have you looked at marshalling the political capital of the institutionals who are retiring because there are a lot of them on both sides of the Hill they're outside the usual power structure now because they've announced. And it seems to me there's got to be a way to help them rebuild this institutional appreciation and move some things forward with it even though it might just be processes. I believe there are eight senators who have announced their retirement. So we're going to bundle just a couple of questions to get a lively discussion. Lenny in the back. Love to hear a little bit more about where you think there are interesting innovations happening in states and cities. I do know one that I would pay attention to which is what the potential for initiative processes do to put things more directly to try some stuff. So right now it's relatively expensive and difficult to do that in most places but we're not very far away from electronic signature gathering and initiatives which will be incredibly disruptive and pretty interesting for what can happen. Thank you. And right behind them I think that's Boykin. I just wonder if you get rid of partisanship if you don't just increase the power of special interests in its place. And if you look throughout the rest of the world in Europe especially where they do use parliamentary systems is there any indication that the governmental outcome is any better. Thank you. We now have three good questions. Maya let's start with you. I think that I mean I think that's a great idea and it's one that we've been trying to figure out how you use that as part of kind of coalition building and giving credibility to do things both with retiring members and retired members. So one of the things we've done is we've built a group of over a hundred retired members who we meet with regularly and try to think about how they can influence their former members. I mean the group that I run actually the board is all people who were in government in the budget running Treasury or the Fed or OMB or something then they come out and they sit on this board because they've experienced it and therefore they can be more useful in persuading their former colleagues to kind of go in the direction of fiscal responsibility that they think is appropriate. So we've done the same things with former members and retiring members. I think I'm in a pessimistic spot on this whole issue so hopefully there are more ways to use it but I continue to battle with the challenge that every time I mean it almost becomes that somebody who would support an issue like this once they announce that they're retiring I think all the other members see like maybe this is something I can only vote for when I'm retiring or maybe this is the kind of thing that's gonna cause me to forcefully get retired later so it's almost become a negative signal in some ways but I'm really interested in trying to think of other ways and hoping you'll help me think of other ways that you can use that kind of capital. The other piece of it is we have a ton of former members who wanna go in and kind of lobby their old colleagues and the truth is their old colleagues don't care that much. So once you're retired unless you have a huge role sort of there's some former members we all point to and many of whom you didn't even appreciate at the time but you look back and you say he was a great senator some of them have a lot of impact but otherwise a lot of them are kind of struggling to keep their own relevancy going and so it hasn't been as an effective kind of here's your cover, here's a coalition that can help move things forward. Though one of the ideas we've thought about is kind of how former members can come up with some of the specific hard ideas that sitting members might not want to do and give them cover on those ideas. It's kind of the way that you use outside commissions or areas of experts to give cover on specific ideas. Thank you. Anybody wanna tackle some optimism at the state and local level? Interesting experiments. Well, can I just, for them, on the one hand I think the Bipoderson Policy Center is becoming at least a little bit of a home for, you know, Olympia Snow is just announced that she's there, Dashel's already there. Number of former senators and representatives who are involved there, trying to do exactly that to create a place where they can have a policy dialogue that is independent of the politics but I think Maya's point is right, their relevance is limited. Ted, I think you said you just saw the numbers on how much turnover there's been and I don't remember exactly the numbers but the number of House members who are not House members when George W. Bush was president is quite striking. Even as incumbency rates have remained high so if you run as an incumbent in a general election you're still likely to be re-elected but with turnovers and parties and retirements the numbers of turnover have been high. On the state level, I would just echo the comment that actually states are just going in an entirely different directions. So New York we're in the middle of a dramatic and highly entertaining fight to try to pass public financing of elections entertaining because of the perp walk that is happening perpetually from Albany and the incredible divisiveness of the state senate. Colorado just passed very advanced voter access rules. I think you were implying the experimentation that's gone on in California around their open primary and top two system which again an experiment but with unintended consequences because you end up with situations where you're essentially rewarding party discipline. So if one party runs four candidates and the other party only runs two the two candidate party will end up even if it would naturally be a seat for the other party. And then by the same token in 2012 you had 12 states passing very restrictive voter ID laws that's happening again. North Carolina is trying to defund their public funding system for their judicial elections which of all things that should have should be devoid of this influence it's judicial elections. And so you're really just seeing things going in opposite directions. Thank you. Ryan Peter you guys wanna jump in? I guess I would say if I see again I mean I think for me fundamentally I don't see this equidistance between the two parties. I see this as much more my own ideological bias. I see this as much more Republican problem. And I think that for me picking up on Ryan said to me what's so hopeful about the immigration story is that it really, if this is a story about the Republican party deciding that it's going to try to win elections by appealing to non-white, not-angle voters instead of running against them which is really what the Republican party has generally done in past elections and is still doing at the state level, right? Then what's encouraging to me is thinking about what happens when it doesn't work. Like I don't think it's gonna work. The Republican party's problems with Hispanics with Latinos, not to mention others is much, much deeper than its position on immigration. And so to me what's exciting is the idea that this could be a gateway drug for the Republican party when they realize actually that it doesn't work and that actually but they have no choice ultimately to continue to try to compete because they're ultimately even states like Texas are gonna get away from them if they can't find a way of competing. But the realization again, I don't think this will happen until another electoral loss that actually competing means that there can't also be against people making it easy for people to vote, right? That that's another way in which they're shooting themselves in the foot and that once they realize the scope of the problem what it would take to actually compete, particularly for Latino voters, it will influence the way they think about their views of government as well and certainly views about voter access. And I think that to me is again a hopeful sign about what could be the tip of the iceberg and tend to potential shift in the Republican party on some of these things. I just had one thing about the ballot initiatives which I think a lot of us were surprised on election night by the results in Colorado and Washington when marijuana was fully legalized in those states and Colorado has this real history of ballot initiatives and this gets to your original question that I ignored Ted about technology. And I mean, I remember when Ross Perot ran in 1992, the major institutional barrier to his campaign was simply getting that third party on the ballots. And that is a place where technology has, we first saw this with the Howard Dean campaign but where the power of the internet has really, really changed things. And as the person who asked the question pointed out we are close to where you can change these cumbersome systems of sending people out with clipboards and getting handwritten signatures where you're just going to be able to do that on the internet. And that's going to completely change the, it's really gonna accelerate the process in states where it's relatively simple to get ballot initiatives, a referendum in front of the voters. And it could potentially be a real game changer when the next serious third party candidate comes along. Now the irony is we're probably, because of polarization, we're probably in a space where it just doesn't make sense for a third party candidate. There's no issue right now for a third party candidate to seize, but we're at a point where it's easier than ever for a third party candidate to overcome these hurdles that the Democrats and Republicans over the years put at the state level to make it very difficult for that third party to get on the ballot. Except when you have states like Florida which mandate that you do it by clipboard and return the forms within 24 hours and 48 hours. And there's a bipartisan, I mean there's no reason for the Democrats and Republicans to change that. Though I suppose the bigger problem right now is in terms of third party savior, there's not really a set of issues for that person to run on given the ideological polarization. Well, we're talking about the, I mean we've had this two party structure for 150 years now and it's kind of remarkable that it's remained intact but it's largely because the parties themselves are really just shells whose coalitions and agendas have been fundamentally inverted and reinvented time and time again. And what I find somewhat optimistic is that both parties really need to reinvent themselves once again, largely because of the fiscal crisis over the next 20 years. When the boomer retirement really kicks in we'll find that even the economic crisis since 2008 will seem like a dry run. And what I mean by that is that each party is sort of held together by sort of a glue, if you will. The Republican party, more than anything else, holds its coalition together on the promise of lower taxes. But in an age in which we are going to have ever fewer workers paying for ever more retirees, the only question, you know, I think 10, 15 years out is going to be how much we're gonna raise taxes by, not how much we're gonna lower them by. And likewise on the Democratic side you could say that, you know, that which binds the coalition together is the desire for, you know, new policy programs. But again, because of the fiscal train wreck ahead, the debate 10 to 15 years from now is gonna be all about which programs do we cut. So the parties themselves are going to have to reinvent whether through the type of landslide victory from and giving up that Peter talks about or through a more graceful process. Let's take a couple more questions. Who wants to jump in? Please. Joe Matthews from Zocalo. Just kind of curious, has sort of science, genetics, psychology, study of memory, any of the sort of research and work that's been done on this sort of in politics? We may have, you know, there's sort of a liberal gene in the sense if you, you know, people use, researchers at UCSD say if you got this amino acid on this part of the chromosome and you had a lot of friends in high school, you're a liberal. Has any of that work or research that's actually being produced in a lot of different fields, you know, outside of, you know, the conventional, is that penetrated this conversation, this sort of attempt to figure out a way to, how to talk to people, how to get people to get along and make politics. Wow, so genetic testing of all members of Congress to map them out. Anybody want to tackle that one? Yeah, it does remind me a lot. I remember very clearly when I was a kid that it was this Dunesbury riff where the thing with the idea was that they, it was this medical school in Haiti and they were doing this very, this cutting edge work where they were gonna implant the heart of a liberal into the body of a conservative. And he went on for this weeks and I remember at one point the doctor said, well, the assistant said to the doctor, well, what if we just get a bigot who likes Brie and the doctor says, well, we'll abort. You know, what if that happens? I don't know. The idea of trying to genetically reprogram people to change their political views maybe sounds like science fiction now, but it's probably something that the Chief Party thinks is already going on. It's what you categorize as one of those process fixes that is not quite right yet. I have to say, that just reminds me why I love New America events. Thank you for that question. That's just like, what makes this entire institution so fascinating because there's so many discussions in Washington that are just the exact same discussion over and over again. Well, somebody has to bring drones into solving this problem, so we'll get there. We have time for one or two more questions. Let me just add one thing. I do think there's something, and I can't name the work, but there's been some political science in the general direction of what you're talking about. And look, as the two parties have sorted, as they've ideologically sorted, as all the liberals have become, or in the Democratic Party, and all the conservatives are now in the Republican Party, which remember, that wasn't true a short time ago, I do think that what makes one a Democrat and what makes one a Republican is much, is not simply a matter of ideology, but much more a matter of identity and culture and there have been some good psychological research looking at that. For instance, how does a party, for instance, favor doing something about climate change in 2008, have a healthcare bill that sets up exchanges, has a mandate, right? That talks about stimulus as a pretty normal way to jump start an economy. How does a party that looks like that in 2008, in 2009, define all three of those things as out of the socialists, right? And I think a lot of that has to do with, with almost a tribal identity, what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat at any one time. And that wasn't so much the case 30 years ago when the parties were much more, what were not a somogenous. It looks like we need to wrap up within about a minute or so. So I want to wrap up on an optimistic note because I want you all to leave this conversation with two thoughts in mind. One, this problem is actually solvable and two, there may even be some remote basis for optimism. So I just wanna briefly review the solutions that you've heard from our group today. So Ryan talked about ending the filibuster in the Senate and he also talked about structural reforms in the House whereby it would be easier to bring votes to the floor. Peter talked about the benefits of landslide elections to completely wipe out one party or the other and enables a hegemony of one party to control all sectors of government for a time. Jonathan talked about fundamental reforms to money and politics and we also talked about various changes to the primary system, such as open primaries or instant runoff voting. All in the context of these changes being able to take place at any level, especially at the state and local level. So although many of these conversations about political dysfunctions and on a pessimistic note, we want to end on an optimistic new America-esque solutions-oriented note. Thank you all very much, a terrific panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.