 Hello, hi. Thank you guys so much for coming. My name is Margaret Streeter and I am the manager for New America, New York Thanks also to the core club for hosting us again this week for an event We're so excited to have Lee here celebrating the launch of his new book breaking the breaking the two-party doom loop Which has just been released this month Lee is a senior fellow at the political reform program at New America and he regularly writes for the times box and other Outlets like that joining Lee is Aisha Moody Mills who is a nationally respected voice on politics Before joining CNN as a political commentator. She was president and CEO of the LGBTQ victory fund and Institute And she was recently a 2019 fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics So please stick around after the conversation Lee will be signing some of his books And please also support him and purchase a book tonight I mean quite a lot two final pieces of housekeeping. We are on the record this evening We're recording the conversation and we'll turn it into a podcast later this week And also it is a very packed house. So if we have some late comers if you have any space On your row if you can make room for them, that'd be great. Thank you again for coming and please join me in welcoming Aisha and Lee Thank you. Welcome everyone. Happy Impeachment Week Or maybe it's an interesting Impeachment week on my end Thank you all for being here I actually am really honored to be invited to have this conversation with Lee and congratulations to you again on this book It's available for sale outside. So do pick up a copy if you don't already have one get it signed I know that so much goes into one's life to do the research and to kind of spend the years three years You said it's been that it took you to put together this book And we just don't have enough time to hear all the dirty details about it, but I do want to know What inspired you to write this book because for at least 20 something years I've been in circles and conversations with some of my progressive friends talking about could we imagine a multi-party system? What would it take for us to have proportional representation? And so this is certainly a structural change conversation that has been ongoing and I'm curious as to what your personal story is and Connection to the topic Well, thank you. It's a great great honor to share the stage with you and So my personal connection well, I mean I wrote this book because I was concerned about the future of American democracy and you know in Washington, I see a dysfunctional and broken Congress and Seem to me that the core problem in American politics was hyper partisanship and So I started to think about well is how do we understand how we got into this moment? And how do we understand how we got out of this moment? I feel like there were a lot of books coming out, you know around around the time that Trump got elected say Oh, you know Trump is this force out of nowhere. He's destroying American politics and well, you know the symptoms I think I think there's there's deeper Deeper structural causes to how we got to this moment and you know I wanted to try to understand them and think about a way out of them and You know, I went down a few rabbit holes I went down the the history rabbit hole of You know tracing tracing how we got to this point and then I went down to the went down the comparative politics rabbit hole Which is like well, what is the rest of the world doing? Is there anything that we can learn and by the end of that? I said well, we have this hyper pole hyper partisan two-party system that is actually something quite new in our political history and this is really dangerous and the US is a really strange country and People should know a little bit more about how weird we are compared to the rest of the world And and maybe there's something else to learn You talk about the you know where we are now it's we all want to blame Trump But certainly Donald Trump's a sense a symptom of something else historically in this country If you look at what's happening in the United States Senate right now and the way the party politics are just split even though we know there are a lot of Formally good people who have consciences For whatever reason there's kind of a hyper partisanship where people are split in these parties And you talk a lot about that and they've done a lot of research around how we got to this place of Polarization and I'd love it if you could share with folks, you know Where were we say 40 or 50 years ago in this country with the parties look like and how we got to a position that We're in now where everything so bifurcated Yeah, so I mean if you went back and took a time machine you went back to 1950 What you'd find was that the parties were pretty indistinguishable from each other and a lot of the criticism of American politics back Then and you know even until someone recently was not the parties were too far apart It was that the parties were too similar and they were indistinguishable Now that that sunny consensus of the 1950s and the 1960s isn't actually so sunny because a lot of it was based on On a somewhat exclusionary brand of politics with a bunch of southern white guys in a room got together and and made policy And and it depended on the extension of or the continuation of the Jim Crow South So I mean the big earthquake in American politics was with civil rights in the 1960s which Really split both parties and set in motion a long slow Realignment of the political parties along social cultural identity issues And it went alongside with it with a nationalization of American politics that for a long time American politics was really state and local politics and as the issues became national issues became more salient people started caring more And more which party controlled Congress now that that You know built for a while then I would say in the 90s You really started to see that the salience of true culture war politics and the parties became much sharper brands and They retreated to their geographical cores the the Republican Party became more and more the party of rural traditional White Christian America and the Democratic Party became more and more the party of urban cosmopolitan Multiracial multicultural America and and as that happened You know used to have a lot of liberal Republicans in New England and New York and on the Coast and you had a lot of conservative Democrats from rural America and in the South and you know I argue that we had something much more like a four-party system and it probably worked best from the mid 60s through the late 80s in which you had the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Republicans and Sorry long liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans and you know on any given issue those you you could build different coalitions and so a lot of landmark legislation passed In in the Senate and the House with large overwhelming majorities me even the civil rights legislation Passed with overwhelming majorities and actually more higher percentage of Republicans supported the civil rights bills of 64 and 65 vended Democrats So once you had the collapse of of of those parties and the parties became more bifurcated and with a winner-take-all system You you know if you if you're down to 40 percent as as Republicans were in the Northeast and Democrats were in rural America You basically stop bothering to run candidates and then the party shrink further to their geographical cores And now we're at this moment when we I would argue that we for the first time really have a genuine Two-party system with two parties with no overlap to truly distinct national parties And and that's the radical experiment that we've been running for the last decade And it's a disaster. It doesn't work with our political institutions and it's driving us all crazy So you call this the doom loop is what you call this So how worried should we be about American democracy right now because I'm flipping out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Anybody else flipping out. It's a hot mess. Yeah. All right. All right. So yeah a lot of wisdom here. Yeah, yeah We should be flipping out a little bit Yeah, we are in this moment of intense hyper partisanship and there's no clear resolution to it we a democracy depends on a shared basis of fairness shared sense of legitimacy shared sense of truth and There's gonna be conflict in politics politics is about conflict, but we need a political system which recognizes that There is some way to resolve those differences and and some process that we can all agree is fair but we don't really have that anymore and we have a situation where neither side really thinks the outcome is fair if they lose and We have a situation in which the politics of changing the rules are becoming more and more aggressive I mean certainly think the Republicans have pushed this a lot further than the Democrats over the last two decades But I mean I could I hear talk about packing the court Democrats at Puerto Rico and DC as states, you know, I mean we're in a moment in which we're People who get into power want to use that power to further that power Rather than creating a level playing field and that is a dangerous condition because once you lose that shared sense of fairness shared sense of legitimacy and willingness to compromise It's really hard to maintain a democracy Well back up for a minute because I want to be a little bit hopeful and I want you to wax poetic for us a bit about What would be those incentives to get back to a place and maybe where we ever been a place in America where there was incentive for compromise Around some shared value of democracy. She started off, you know acknowledging that maybe 1950s U.S. Congress wasn't necessarily a deep representation of our democracy So what do you think might be a way to? incentivize us back to a place where the folks who were elected to represent us felt like they were actually Required to represent all of the United States and be a representative democracy Well, I feel like what we need is a is we have representatives who actually do represent the full diversity and pluralism of America So, you know, I think that I mean this is it's a it's a fundamental challenge and it goes back to Madison and Federalist number 10 and and Madison. I think which is a very brilliant essay and really the foundation I think of the American political system in Madison says look Here here here's the challenge of democracy self-governance is that there are a lot of factions in society and people are gonna disagree people are gonna have different religious values people are gonna have different financial and economic interests and So we've got to set up a system that's legitimate for everyone So the way we got to do that is make sure that there is no one faction that is permanently Dominant and no one faction that is permanently dominated so no permanent majorities no permanent minorities and to build legitimacy you actually have to build an inclusive coalition and To me that is a vision of how multi-party democracy operates in practice that there's it's not one side trying to be a narrow majority And press the other side. I mean the framers aided political parties They were desperately afraid of political parties because they thought that what political parties would be would would be just two parties and you would have a majority party and a minority party and and as it always had been a Majority would use its power to oppress a minority and the minority would say the system is not legitimate and Therefore you'd have civil war of some sort of collapse of democracy now The system That they came up with to prevent political parties with separation of powers plus federalism Which in a sense sort of did the job that they thought it was gonna do for a good 200 years Really preventing the strong national parties, but that that is the past now, and you know I mean obviously it has a it has a checkered past as well but it Sort of worked, but you know, I think and I really do believe had proportional representation Been invented at the time it wouldn't be invented until the the early 19th century It wouldn't go into use until the early 20th century And have they accepted that political parties are necessary for modern mass democracy to function They would have wanted something like that so where does this work talk to us about what you mean by proportional representation and talk to us about models of a Multi-party democracy so that everyone kind of understands where this might work Yeah, so proportional representation is actually a family of electoral systems that are designed to guarantee that a party Gets 30% of the vote in the electorate gets 30% of the seats in the legislature And what we have is first passed the post which is single-winner districts in which it's theoretically possible for one party to get 46% of the vote and get zero percent of the seats It doesn't win any any elections or for someone to win the majority of the vote for president and then not become president Yeah, or as as or through intense gerrymandering to win 46% of the seats and 40% of the vote and win Like 60% of the seats as Wisconsin so it allows for all kinds of gerrymandering now there are a broad range of proportional representation systems the most extreme Hyper PR version is Israel which you know has a has one national electoral district and a relatively low threshold for parties And so Israel has 17 parties In government and or 17 parties that have representation in government and that and that's too many Sorry, can you imagine that here? Yeah, I mean, it's too many like more than seven gets too confusing too much fracture But like four to six is probably I think more or less the right amount and the way you target that number is Both by the threshold how many how how much share do you need to get representation and the district size larger? District magnitude the more parties so that the system that I propose in this book is Rank choice voting which we can go into a little bit more detail with multi-member districts It's the system that Ireland has used for a hundred about a hundred years system that Australia has used You know, I think these are relatively healthy democracies with With you know, pretty pretty stable moderate multi-party systems You know there are there are we could discuss different models But I think that's the one that that I'm that I mostly think is the best So map that out for us then so here we are in the in the United States, right? We've got a two-party system. It's only getting worse at this point Yeah and I personally think that it's going to get even worse before it gets better because you just said something that alarmed me Not because you know, you're wrong and thinking history But because Donald Trump has said this in a lot of different ways that when these when the party system fractures and democracy breaks down It often leads to civil war. Yeah, and that frightens me because it is a conversation that you know, a couple of days ago We see like a guy's marching in the streets with guns to defend their rights in a very militia mentality We see a lot of like frustration and uprising Where people are, you know lawmakers in say Last year in Oregon Republican lawmakers kind of like fled and threatened and said we're gonna get our militias to protect us federal government if you come and do X Y and Z and so there's these Around the country we're seeing right now and it's broken down on party lines this kind of subtle Not so subtle unrest starting to burgeon up and it makes me really anxious and so I wonder as you are doing this Theoretical work if you could kind of bring it into like where we are today with this two-party system That's broken and kind of you know What you think could be the worst-case scenario or the best-case scenario about how we real ourselves in I mean the worst-case scenario is Is that violence that's below the surface and increasingly peeking up becomes just more above the surface I mean that yeah, there is I think a genuine risk of of of Some serious political violence in this country. I think there's a genuine risk of elections being rigged and not fair I think there's a genuine risk of a crackdown on on civil liberties all of these things. I think are genuine risks now But ultimately, you know, I'm I'm hopeful because I think We're having this conversation where and we're asking these big questions and You know a lot when you know when Donald Trump got elected that was a that was a tremendous wake-up call for a lot of people in this country who were not very politically engaged and got very politically engaged and People have been turning out to political events getting involved in politics at Incredibly high-level a whole whole younger generation is really engaged in politics And that makes me optimistic Also, I'm optimistic because we've had cycles of decline and renewal in in the history of American politics and there have been these eras in which it felt like things were broken and Nothing was gonna happen and then people got engaged social movements built up There was a moral energy to politics and we have made our democracy throughout our history more inclusive more Representative more democratic more responsive then we've done it You know, I would argue we've done it four times the Revolutionary War the expansion of the franchise in the 1830s The progressive era is the big one in which you know, we we got women's suffrage We got a direct election of senators primaries referendum initiative and the civil rights era is the other big one And you know in which we got tremendous expansion of the franchise so These big bursts of democracy renewal happen every 60 years or so and if I tack on another 60 years from the 1960s that takes us to the 2020s and we see a a lot of the similar Similar hallmarks of these periods we see a moral energy and energized People people being very energized about politics Also in all these areas there's been a transformation of of the media structure in that new new media Entered and and displaced old media and gave gave new voices and a rise of social movements And I I think of new social movements that are really really empowered by the media whether it's black lives matter or the Me Too movement Which you know, I mean a lot of voices that had been shut out and and there are these transformations in which the the hierarchy and of society is changing and You know those those cause You know some people to feel like things are going going downhill because they're losing power But in the end, you know, these are moments in which our democracy expands to be more more inclusive and more Representative and more responsive and I think we're I mean, I really do feel like You know, I'm torn because on the one hand, you know, I see what's happening now And it's easy to feel pessimistic and hence hence the doom loop But, you know, it's these moments of crisis. I mean, we're having these conversations and a lot of people are having similar conversations I think though that the need you just talked about how the need for Us to have this structural upheaval is actually more prevalent now Perhaps then through those other four sides you talked about because when you had what operated more like a maybe we should close This door here. Just close that would operated more like a four-party ish kind of fluid system As we were going through those those revolutionary changes You actually had a set up in America where people could protest on the outside and there was some level of change Yeah, so if the media structure, you know opened up or or whatever it was you could go in there that the civil Dr. King could go in and he could shame enough segregationist through photos of people being you know blown out in the streets That something would change, right? Now what you're sharing with us is that we look at the Senate today and Mitch McConnell doesn't have to move He doesn't have to do a damn thing Literally you have whether we have protests in the streets whether we have media new media that is truth-telling literally right now you have You have the the the members of the house who are actually serving as the lawyers putting up video of testimony That can't be refuted This is literally out of the mouths of people who have testified and you still have an entire party That's like fingers in their ear. Nope. We're not doing anything. No. No. No, it's no and so I Want to be hopeful too, but I wonder if we have as Structurally gotten to a point where we're stuck in this doom loop of this two-party Kind of system where then are their levers of change to actually move people who? Frankly don't feel that they have to be moved because they're going to get reelected in their districts to your point because they're not Competitive anymore for all the reasons What do we do like how do we see an opportunity to fix something? Well, I mean I think Most Americans are deeply frustrated with how the system works. I mean you look at at However, you want to frame this as a polling question, you know How people feel about how our democracy is working? Is hitting lows in the history of modern polling trust in government Satisfaction so people and nobody although people are partisan People don't nobody feels like they're winning everybody feels like they're losing and More and more Americans are choosing to identify as independence Neither Democrat nor Republican Now they may vote as Democrats or Republicans, but they're protesting the party system by refusing to identify in polls Two-thirds of Americans say they would like to have more than two parties. That's at a record high number. So There's there's a lot of support out there and and I look at what's happened I look at what happened in Maine that the citizens in Maine Twice voted over the legislature using the the referendum process to have ranked choice voting in Maine There'll probably be a ballot initiative in Massachusetts. So there are a lot of states where people can do ballot initiatives you know also New York has ranked has passed right choice voting for for for city elections It's catching on so, you know and even politicians themselves They don't like the job most members of Congress complain all the time How miserable it is to be a member of Congress because all they're doing is all this endless partisan fighting I mean a lot of people in the Republican Party feel that their party has been taken over by Trump But the thing is in a two-party system. They have nowhere else to go So they got to embrace the guy and their electoral fates are tied to him I mean I remember Trump was not particularly popular or beloved within the Republican Party when he started out but a lot of Republicans realized well, I'm not a Democrat and You know, we well, that's this is my team and you know, at least he's trolling the liberals So, okay great and and that and it's that you know trolling the Libs is Is a phrase of our time, but it's a phrase about negative partisanship It doesn't matter what Trump is doing you can do anything as long as he's pissing off those liberals he's okay and You know, that's what unifies the parties increasingly is well, we're just gonna unify We don't care what our side does as long as our side beats the other side or makes them mad So if two-thirds of the population is now currently polling Saying that they're not into any of this party badness and they want to completely disassociate with it Do we see an opportunity? Do you see an opportunity to go in to that two-thirds and say guys? I've got a new system for you And do you think that we could actually create a movement around like kind of Right choice voting talk to us about that and what that might look like Because right now we're literally doing it at the ballot and that's its own thing that happens in liberal bastions. Maybe yeah, well I mean, I do think that that there is Support and demand and there's already a movement that's beginning to build around a literary form now Ranked choice voting for those of you who are not familiar with it It's a system of voting where rather than having a single shot Pick only one you get to rank your candidates in order of preference and you'll now get to do that if you vote in New York City primaries Now there are two there's the single winner form of ranked choice voting Which is what's mostly been used and then there's the multi-winner form. I'll explain the single-winner form First single-winner firm form is, you know, they're candidates on the ballot you rank them one to five In order of your preference then the votes are tallied if one candidate has the has a majority of first preference votes That candidate is the winner if not we go to a second round and it's a runoff the bottom candidate is tossed out their Votes are transferred to whatever whoever their voters listed as their backup choice their second preference And then we keep aggregating up until you get a majority winner Now the the the case for rank choice voting is I think quite strong I mean one it allows people fuller expression of How they how they want to rank their candidates and allows people to vote for a candidate that they really like Even if that candidate might they might otherwise be a spoiler So it removes the spoiler effect forces candidates to build broader coalitions and actually be to build a majority coalition in the single-winner system and Where it's been implemented its voters really like it gives them more expression more choices And it leads to less negative campaigning and more coalitional politics because even if even if I'm not gonna be your first choice I might want to be your second or third choice And it leads candidates to reach out to other Constituencies that they might have written off if it wasn't gonna be their first if they were gonna be their first choice Now the multi-winner form which you which would be rather than having a single-member district You say I have a five-member district which they do in Ireland And for the Australian Senate is it works the voter experience is the same you get to rank your candidates But rather than just having the one winner get a majority You have the top five finisher's after transfers and that's a proportional form because it's a multi-winner election so you don't have to get fifty percent in order to get representation and In Ireland they typically have between three and five parties So in all honesty how many people got that? Who's confused? So this is actually quite interesting and I asked this question not because I mean it's a it's a sounds to me like a very Democratically fair idea and I personally support ranked choice voting, but I'll tell you something I live in Bed Stuy Bedford Stuyverson, Brooklyn, which is a African-American community and New York just had on the ballot in November ranked choice voting And so I was down at my local Democratic Club meeting and having this conversation and I show up It's not a surprise that I'm a more of a progressive on these issues And I think about democracy and I was shocked to find that my local Democratic Club actually was Passing out palm cards telling people in our community not to vote for it And they were telling people to not vote for it because the seniors at the senior center So like you know black folks over like 50 were completely confused about the whole thing and no idea what like didn't understand I got a rank people. I normally just get the big one. I'm a Democrat like do I vote for Democrats? What's the you know, how do I vote on party lines? It was actually quite confusing? And so I wonder is there an educated given two-thirds of the people think that what we have is not good Yeah, but so many other people especially reliable voters who tend to be people over 50 Get really confused by it. How do we get over that and kind of bridge that education piece of it? Well, there certainly is an education component to it And I mean I think part of part of the effort has to in in reform is is about educating voters I think the experience of the cities that have enacted it is that once People actually go through the process of doing it. They find that they like it they find that it actually is simple, but it is something new and For a certain set of voters that something new is something different and something scary, but you know the overwhelmingly 92 95% of voters in cities that have it say it was it actually was simple and they like doing it Can you give us a scenario of how this might have played out in a? Recent hotly contested election if there were more of a ranked choice system rather than a winner take all Who might not have actually been the winner are you thinking of of the 2016 presidential election? Okay, all right all right So all right, so well, I mean For for for well assume that there was no I mean the challenge Well, actually the challenge with that is that there there is we should think about it in a particular state because we have the electoral college So like take Michigan which Trump narrowly won, but he didn't get a majority of votes in Michigan There were some Jill Stein voters. There were some Gary Johnson voters now If you think that most of those voters had they been forced to say well, you know I can only choose Clinton or Trump They might have they probably would have show a lot of them probably would have chosen Clinton And if they were allowed to rank well my you know my first choice is Jill Stein But my second choice is Hillary Clinton Then those Jill Stein once Jill Stein got eliminated those voters would have transferred to Hillary Clinton Probably Johnson would have been more half-and-half, but probably Hillary Clinton would have won under that circumstance So when you talk about so walk us through kind of the broad so do are you lobbying for are you recommending that Every state shift to proportional representation up and down in the way that we the way that we manage our political system Is that how we fix this crazy two-party doom loop? Yes So then it's not about multi-parties at all. It's about a ranked-choice voting system, which is a different Well ranked-choice voting system with proportional representation would effectively create a multi-party system So I mean there are benefits. There are benefits of ranked-choice voting as a voting system Independent, I mean, I think it would make two-party politics if we kept the single-winner system would make two-party politics work a little Bit better, but I think the real power comes when you combine it with multi-member districts Which gives you a form of proportional representation, which allows for multiple parties and now what you have instead of having a national level having two parties trying to compete for this narrow elusive majority in which They they win by tearing down the other party making the other party look extreme and competent dangerous Suddenly you have five or six parties now. No party is a majority. No party thinks. It's going to be the dominant party Every party in order to govern has to work with other parties has to build coalitions has to Build broader majorities and has to be more inclusive And so you you have much situation in which majorities are more fluid and no no one party Feels like it's going to be permanently You know, I mean the danger in this current situation is that both sides feel like if the other side wins My humanity is going to be compromised my values are going to be fundamentally compromised because the other side is so extreme and so different and That is a really dangerous position to be in and in a multi-party system. You have You know more more different shades People who could see themselves and maybe one or two different parties And the parties are not trying to dominate each other in the same way It's not this winner-take-all zero-sum trench warfare for this limited control It's it's building broad coalitions to actually get stuff done. I'm curious how other people have if you Can share examples of how other countries may have Shifted their system somewhere midway in like the last 100 years because I'm curious It's one thing to have a brand new let's say you have a brand new constitution. You're starting over I don't know South Africa or someone right like a newer Constitutional setup that can just mandate that we're gonna have this and that's what we're gonna do Yeah, but when you're already entrenched in 400 years of history and then you try to figure out how to have some kind of Structural change it's far more difficult and I and I think the thing that's coming up for me as I listen to you talk about this you just mentioned the word humanity as if Politicians are supposed to be thinking about you know common humanity, right? And I feel like we've gotten a bit lost and away from the P The the actual people in our political system the P in politics. There's a whole values Underpinning about what you're talking about that gets down to dignity respect inclusivity Humanity the actual people in the politics not at all what we talk about because it's so cutthroat So yeah, how has this looked where have you seen other other societies? Get back to the heart of the heart and the people in order to be able to shift well One country that made the transition from a first pass the post to party system to a Proportional system is New Zealand which did it in the 1990s now, New Zealand politics was pretty dysfunctional throughout most of the 1980s and Confidence in political institutions was extremely low There have been a very unpopular austerity program neither party and was was particularly popular and There was there was growing demand for New Zealand to change its political system to get rid of First pass the post voting and it was a little bit of a political football between the two parties I tell the story of how that happened in the book Yeah, or or or just look at chapter 10 Browse it but but yes, of course by it and You know it was this issue in which the you know the parties didn't you know Initially opposed it but then kind of once reform became so popular parties eventually had to get behind it And you know New Zealand politics which had been pretty dysfunctional up to that point and trusted institutions in New Zealand was in the single single digits They adopted the they adopted the actually the German system of proportional representation Which is a would you get a compensatory vote a party list vote on top of a single single member district? and then New Zealand politics actually became a lot more functional after that and anybody who studies New Zealand politics considers that a very successful reform and You know today, New Zealand is constantly at the top of lists of of healthiest democracies in the world So more like New Zealand, I Mean, I don't know. I just don't know. I think that there's just so many factions here in the United States that it's kind of hard to break through. Can you talk to us about how? Diversity layers on top of this the the fact that we have a shifting demographic here where there's a rise of a whole new American majority that are People of color who are ultimately going to be the majority of the population and then at some point the majority of the voting age Population which is really throwing quite a wrench in so much of the divisiveness that we see Which is why you've got these hawkish immigration. I guess we call them immigration policies. They're just mean at this point So talk to us about like how all the social Anxiety and what we're experiencing really factors into this because when you're a monolithic society you can kind of do some interesting things Yeah, a little tricky. Well having a multi-ethnic democracy is a challenge and certainly the changing demographics the changing power status hierarchies, you know have really created a tense political moment, but that tension has been exacerbated and amplified by a party system which is fundamentally divided along these lines and that you have one party that is essentially the at its core a party of white traditionalist Christian America that says hold on this change is changing the America we know and we don't like it and Another party in the Democratic Party that says we believe we are a nation of immigrants diversity gives us strength and We we can't get there fast enough and By making that conflict a very binary conflict when there are actually a lot more shades of gray in there And making it about all these cumulative identities and people's entire And a sense that if my side loses I have no say in that I have no value. I have no say in this country We've just pure We've just poured fire on on this poor poured gasoline on this this little fire and rat and and you know It's made it very hard to control now a lot of societies are Divided along these these cleavage lines now and the most dangerous thing to do when you have that is to say Okay, we're gonna put all the people who believe in diversity on this side and all the people who think that we're moving too fast on this side and now go fight it out for narrow for a narrow majority control and by the way, if you lose the other side will crush your humanity and you know that that's just a recipe for For a really dangerous politics now. Well, I mean I I think a lot about sums it up where we are You know, yeah, okay, well fix it Lee. All right. Well Let's go. Let's go back to Madison federalist number 10 You know and again, there's a basic point Madison made in that You know essay says, you know look society is diverse and the key is we want to create a politics in which no One side feels that they are going to be permanently dominant or permanently Dominated now Madison's first grade cause was religious liberty and he was really fond of the saying from Voltaire that Basically a paraphrase because it's a little stilted, but you know that if there's one religion It's arbitrary if there's two religion people are fighting over Fighting over who who gets to go to heaven and cutting each other's throat over it And if there's many religions people can live in peace I mean we have a we have a functioning multi-ethnic democracy in in in America. It's called New York City and You know New York City is Is it is a place where there is no one group that is dominant and because there's no one group That there's no clear dominant group. Everybody. Nobody is worried about being dominated by somebody else And I mean not that New York City doesn't have its tensions and its problems But you know, I think on the whole it's a pretty healthy multi-ethnic democracy. So that that gives me hope So I want to know I know that you all have some some interesting questions that you want to raise So I want to leave time for that but just as we're on this this commerce this kind of thread through about humanity I am very much interested how you consume this history You consume this broken system you have hope for how we fix it But see the frustrations in front of us of how challenging that is and you've been embedded in this for so many For so long just your career But certainly, you know not really seeing the light of day over the last few years Tell us a little bit about your humanity. What do you do for fun? What do I do for fun? I cook dinner for my family. I play with my kids. I play music and Dedication in your book and dedication to my book I have two young daughters Elsa and and have Elsa's is six havas three and a half And I dedicated this book to them because I want them to grow up in a healthy thriving democracy That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your work And I hope that you know you get out on the circuit and kind of influence people who Still have a heart left and actually who just care deeply about our society in our democracy I think we've gotten a bit away from that Where the people who care don't even feel like they can talk about it because they're in such a fight