American Democracy Isn’t Broken… It Never Worked as Advertised

The Federalist Papers, argues our guest, University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns, belongs in the fiction section of the library. And after watching the Trump years dismantle everything we were told would hold, it’s getting harder to disagree.

Back in 2024, we asked the hypothetical question of Stearns whether American democracy had reached its sell-by date? It’s no longer hypothetical. 

The guardrails weren’t structural; they were customary. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall; it was a framework held together by norms that turned out to be entirely optional. And the Madisonian dream of competing institutional jealousies keeping power in check? That, Stearns says, was always more mythology than reality.

Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, returns to WhoWhatWhy to take stock of what’s been lost — and more provocatively, what might still be salvageable. His diagnosis is clear: We have thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it. 

His prescription is radical but specific: three amendments that could transform a broken two-party system into something that actually reflects how 21st century democracy needs to work.

But the harder questions may be the ones he can’t fully answer: Has the damage already gone too far? Can a public raised on American exceptionalism be educated out of it? And do things have to get worse before they start to get better?

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:10] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We thought we were asking a hypothetical question back in 2024 when University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns asked whether the American system of government had reached its sell by date. It still felt like a question with time on its side. We could still imagine our way to a different outcome. The guardrails we told ourselves would hold. The institutions we assured ourselves were stronger than any one person. History, we believed, had a way of course correcting. We were wrong on all counts. What we’re living through now isn’t a stress test of American democracy. It’s something closer to the deliberate dismantling.

The difference matters. Stress tests assume the structure is sound and the pressure is temporary. What we’re seeing is neither. Institutions we assumed or hoped were self-correcting have proven to be anything but. Guardrails we thought were structural turned out to be merely customary: traditions, norms, and gentlemen’s agreements that depended entirely on everyone’s agreeing to honor them. And the Constitution, that document the founders gave us with such reverence and such confidence, has shown itself to be surprisingly, even shockingly, fragile in the hands of people determined to exploit its silences, the silences around executive power, the silences around the pardon, the silences around what happens when one branch simply decides the other two don’t matter.

My guest Maxwell Stearns saw this coming. His book, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, argued that the fault lines were not in our leaders, but in our system. That we had built or evolved a government uniquely vulnerable to exactly this kind of capture. And that without structural change, we were one bad election away from catastrophe. We’ve had that election. Twice, if you’re counting. And now the question isn’t whether the system is broken, it’s whether it can be fixed at all, and if so, whether the political will, the public appetite, and the institutional capacity to fix it still exists in any meaningful form. Or whether what we’re really doing in conversations like this one is writing the autopsy. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Maxwell Stearns back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Max, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:02:40] Maxwell Stearns: Jeff, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it very much.

[00:02:43] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you back. When we talked a couple of years ago, one of the points that you made is that the real enemy of democracy is extremism. I was thinking about that in the context of events that we watched last night, and seeing extremism at its most extreme, really, within the political context. Talk about that, first of all.

[00:03:06] Maxwell Stearns: Well, I assume you’re talking about the State of the Union Address. And absolutely, it was an exercise in extremism. As I watched it, I kept thinking about how foreign leaders, or simply citizens of other nation-states around the world — who undoubtedly were watching it and will more likely watch small clips sort of cut out for popular display — would understand the theatrics of a State of the Union Address, the purpose of which clearly wasn’t to demonstrate a common vision for improving this nation, but for creating a literal dividing line straight up the center of the joint session, listening to him speak, by denigrating those that, from his perspective, were to his right, while commending those that, from his perspective, were to his left, not ideologically, but physically in the room. And it was a devastating experience to watch for what it forebodes, and for what it actually captures that has occurred since the beginning of this second term.

[00:04:18] Jeff Schechtman: And if, in fact, extremism is the enemy of democracy, and we have seen the, really, apotheosis of that, one wonders whether it’s even fixable at this point, whether we’ve simply gone too far, whether we’ve crossed the proverbial political Rubicon.

[00:04:35] Maxwell Stearns: So I get asked this question a fair amount. And, you know, I wrote this book coming up on two years, actually, March 5, it will be two years. And one of the things I take a little bit of pride in, in having written it, is that when it came out, it wasn’t locked in who was necessarily going to be even the nominee of the two major parties, although I forecast that, of course, Joe Biden would be the nominee for the Democratic Party, and that was before the change to Kamala Harris. And I forecast that, of course, Donald Trump would be the nominee for the Republican Party. But one of the things that I take some pride in is that I didn’t premise my predictions — on the challenges that we were facing and the need for radical reform — on the outcome of the 2024 election. I knew we were in crisis for a long time, and I knew that what we were witnessing was a trend line in which both the Democratic and Republican parties were moving inexorably further and further apart. It’s interesting, I think, about the response to the State of the Union address, and it sounded in moderation, but that doesn’t imply or shouldn’t be read to imply that all is sort of moderate and comfortable on the Democratic side. There’s a profound fracture going on, on the Democratic side, just as there had been on the Republican side. It’s sort of an echo of what happened to the Republican Party. And so what I see is two parties that are each dependent on marriages with the wings of the party that are increasingly extreme, that are driving the wedge further and further apart. And so a lot of people ask the question you just asked: is it too late to recover? But I think that there are two obligations that we have –and I knew this when I wrote the book, and since I’ve given talks around the country, since publishing it. And the first obligation is the American public needs to be educated. They need to understand what went wrong and why. They need to understand what the alternatives are, and they need to understand how we can actually fix things. But the second part of it is hope. They need to actually have hope that because we’re so dedicated to having a democracy for our children and grandchildren and future generations, this is a project desperately worth working toward. And so, yes, you know, I am not Pollyannish. I understand the challenges. But yes, I still hold hope and I still hold the commitment to educating the public.

[00:07:15] Jeff Schechtman: As you look at the events of the past 18 months or so, are you even surprised at how vulnerable the Constitution is? That, in fact, it’s hard to imagine that it could have been as fragile as it seems to have turned out to be?

[00:07:32] Maxwell Stearns: I wish I could say yes, but no, I’m not shocked. I mean, I will say there are certain things that have happened that I think are far worse than I predicted, but there were so many things that I predicted. Anybody who read Project 2025 had a very clear sense of what the ultimate agenda was going to be, despite Donald Trump’s claim that he had no idea what that was about. It was quite clear that the people that were going to be surrounding him were motivated to bring to fruition many of the objectives articulated in that project. And honestly, our formal constitutional structure is very, very thin. The thing that really has allowed this country to function for so long are informal norms that get beyond the formal structures. And it became increasingly clear really since the beginning of the information age — but even more so as we hit the period of the teens with the ascent of Donald Trump — that those norms were becoming threadbare, that people were not, politicians were not thinking, “if I break this norm, what is the consequence going to be in five, 10, 20 years?” Instead, it was always with an eye toward getting the immediate desired result. And if we don’t have an ability to see the future consequences of our present erosion of democratic norms, then we are really heading right into a threatened demise of our democracy. And frankly, we were in crisis for a long time. The question is, can we educate the public enough? Can we convey enough hope so that people will understand that we have to take, finally, the notion of radical reform seriously? Because nothing short of that’s going to do the trick.

[00:09:30] Jeff Schechtman: As you’ve talked about, as the U.S. has encouraged and exported democracy around the world, we’ve never actually exported our version of democracy anywhere else in the world.

[00:09:41] Maxwell Stearns: Well, certainly that’s true. Yes, that’s 100% right. We’ve exported democracy around the world, especially since World War II, but never our system of two-party presidentialism. And there’s a pretty simple reason for that. It doesn’t work. And in fact, it never worked. And one of the things I try to convey in the book is we all have grown up — those of us like you and me who have grown up here in the United States — we’ve been kind of sort of educated on this notion of American exceptionalism that our system somehow magically endured longer than other systems, leading us to thrive. But we have thrived. We’ve thrived economically in many respects. Of course, at great cost to particular groups of people. We look at the history, for example, the tragic history of slavery, the tragic history with respect to Native American communities as a result of Western expansion. But we’ve had a constant influx of immigrants. We have been protected in ways that European nations, for example, and other nations and other continents have not, from hostile neighbors. We have two oceans and friendly neighbors, North and South. And so we’ve thrived. But we’ve thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it. And it’s really vital for people to get past their childhood lessons of American exceptionalism and look at how other systems of government work and begin to think about, as I try to convey in the book, how ours could work so much better.

[00:11:17] Jeff Schechtman: One thing that’s clear is that the Constitution never intended for, or provided for, or really had at its core in any way the idea of a multi-ethnic kind of democracy that we see today.

[00:11:30] Maxwell Stearns: Well, I mean, that’s certainly true. I mean, one can one can trace roots of, you know, obviously racism in its most profound and horrific sense with the history of slavery, the initial success and then ultimate failure in so many respects of Reconstruction and the long history of racism throughout. I mean, I say to my constitutional law students that the through line in our constitutional history is race, even in areas that people don’t think are about race. But there are other isms as well. And we have had denigrating policies toward Chinese immigrants. We’ve had denigrating policies toward women. Think about the fact that it took women 50 more years after black men were given the right to vote, from 1870 to 1920. That’s a remarkable thing to consider. So the framers’ understanding of what democracy meant, who a democracy extended to include, was clearly very limited to white men. But, you know, frankly, if you go back to that historical period, that was not unique to the United States. And one of the things I will say is that we have had the capacity in the history to expand out who is included. Now, of course, we’ve done this in ways that have not proved to be very effective. Certainly, the 15th Amendment giving black men the right to vote took, you know, really almost another century to bring to fruition with statutory and judicial improvements along the way. So we have to be realistic about this. But the fact of the matter is that we have expanded who’s included in the “we” from the “We thePeople” that begins the document that we that we call our Constitution.

[00:13:34] Jeff Schechtman: Given where we are now, when you look at a potential parliamentary system, even in the manner that you outline in detail in the book, does what we have recently experienced make that probability better or worse?

[00:13:49] Maxwell Stearns: You know, it’s a question that I wish I was able to answer in a satisfactory way. What I what I will say is this. There’s a fascinating book by Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way. Steve Levitsky is a Harvard political scientist. Lucan Way is a Canadian political scientist. And Steve Levitsky also wrote a piece in The Atlantic about this idea that they call competitive authoritarianism. And the intuition is that in presidential systems, whether South American presidential systems or our presidential system, successor presidents are rarely going to be inclined to relinquish the powers they inherit from their predecessor, even if they fundamentally disagree on policy with their predecessor. And one of the consequences as these elections push the parties further and further apart in the United States, is that we are apt to see hard right, you know, sort of Republican candidates for the presidency running against really hard left Democratic candidates for the presidency so that it begins to look like races between sort of Democratic socialists on one side and folks who really are infusing substantial elements of neo-fascism on the other. And we’re going to see pendulum swings that are increasingly broad. And one of the things that goes back to my earlier comment about not seeing the future is: what happens if it really does swing hard the other way? What are Republicans going to think? How are they going to react? Right? And the question becomes, is there a way for centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans to come together and say: we have to fix this craziness. We have to work toward a set of reforms that once and for all ends the sort of process by which we are being governed increasingly by extremists on both sides. And the proposal that I advance facilitates that by allowing the Democratic Party, which right now is a party of centrist Democrats and progressives, to split into two parties, and the Republican Party, which is a marriage between centrist Republicans and MAGA, to split into two parties, and to allow perhaps a Green Party or a Libertarian party to emerge and to allow coalition structures to bring out the best of the most effective of those parties so that we can finally come up with a system that allows moderates in good faith, people who don’t think the other side is always evil and should be insulted, as we saw last night in the State of the Union address. People of good faith in the middle to come together and say, yeah, we have to compromise with each other. None of us are going to get absolutely everything we want. That’s called democracy. And it’s better to live in a democracy and concede things than rigidly insist that it’s our way or the highway and we’ll win one election and you’ll win another. And meanwhile, the people that are going to lose again and again and again are the American people, as we have these pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.

[00:17:15] Jeff Schechtman: And yet the public, the American public, is an accomplice in this. I mean, they saw Trump’s first term and then turned around and said, we’d like some more of that.

[00:17:26] Maxwell Stearns: So I think that I can’t disagree that he won the election. Look, he won the election, unlike in 2016 with the majority of the popular vote; he won it with the majority of the Electoral College. No question he won the election. But where I’m slightly going to resist that characterization is he won an election in a system that forced a choice between two deeply problematic candidates. That’s the reality. Initially, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and then we didn’t really have a meaningful choice for the successor to Joe Biden. And so we had a candidate who lacked certain concerns about legitimacy because Kamala Harris was, of course, Joe Biden’s chosen successor. But she she didn’t she didn’t succeed in the rough and tumble of a primary to become the party’s nominee. And when she did run in the primary, she didn’t do particularly well. Right. I mean, you know, she was chosen to be the vice presidential nominee by Joe Biden, but she was not a particularly successful primary candidate. Of course we have Donald Trump. And this is because these parties cannot afford to relinquish any of their support. And so, yeah, Donald Trump won, but he had taken over the Republican Party. And as a consequence of that, given the two choices that we had, yes, he won in a deeply problematic election that involved a Democratic candidate who had not really been vetted in the ordinary primary caucus cycle. So what I would say is Donald Trump won in a profoundly problematic election that emerged from a profoundly broken electoral system. That’s not an imprimatur on him. And it’s not a source of condemnation for the American people. The American people need to take seriously the notion of serious reform so that they are not only given a choice with respect to voting at the end, they actually get to contribute to the options by voting for parties in addition to voting for who gets seated in the House of Representatives representing a district, which is what my proposal does. It essentially filters the choice of the president through the House of Representatives, giving each voter two ballots in the House of Representatives, one for a seated member who will represent their district and one by party. And you’ll be able to send a much more surgically precise signal of what it is you value, what you want the coalition to look like and the price you’re willing to pay to be part of a successful governing coalition. So I think it’s just my modest pushback is that people produced an outcome as a consequence of the system we have. And I don’t think we can blame the electorate for having foisted upon them choices that were deeply problematic and ending up with an admittedly profoundly problematic selection at the end of that deeply troubling election.

[00:20:49] Jeff Schechtman: One of the interesting aspects, though, about where we are now is that in even in a parliamentary system, there is a certain loyalty to the institution of the legislature. And it seems that what we have witnessed over the past couple of years is essentially an abandonment of any kind of loyalty to the legislative process.

[00:21:12] Maxwell Stearns: Well, I think that’s fair. One of the things that I observed as I was watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was how many of the things that he is proposing to do and insisting that he has the power to do, despite, for example, the Supreme Court days ago telling him, no, you do not have the power to do this, is the number of things that he claimed the power to do simply as a matter of executive fiat, right? In other words, he is a classic example of an autocrat who cannot be bothered with the inconvenience of democratic processes. And that’s profoundly difficult. He’s seeking to eradicate the independence of independent agencies. He’s seeking to end the professionalism of the civil service. He’s really hearkening back to a time when individuals are going to run agencies based on patronage. People will get federal jobs based on support for him. And this is not what Americans want. But in order to have faith in our institutions, they have to understand that the institutions can deliver better policies and better options than what they’re delivering now. And I keep coming back to the key point here. This requires education. One of the real challenges in our country is that for so many years — decades, maybe even longer — Americans had been led to believe that they don’t have to look beyond our borders to understand democracy, that somehow the framers of the Constitution solved the problem. And all the answers are here in our history and in our borders. And that’s just wrong. And this requires education. People need to understand that institutions can deliver more and better for them, but they have to be structured in a manner to achieve that benign vision.

[00:23:10] Jeff Schechtman: That structure is more than just a parliamentary system. I mean, the Weimar Republic had a parliamentary system that didn’t work out too well, that it really is…

[00:23:20] Maxwell Stearns: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…

[00:23:22] Jeff Schechtman: Go ahead. But it’s really a question of how the how the system is structured, as you’ve talked about.

[00:23:25] Maxwell Stearns: Well, the Weimar Republic was an example of a deeply problematic parliamentary system. It was pure proportionality. It had far too many parties. And it allowed Hitler to come in and roll over other leaders one by one until he assumed complete control. And so one of the main points, you know, early on when you said that in our prior conversation, which I so enjoyed, that I repeatedly emphasized that the threat to democracy isn’t disagreement. It’s not policy disagreement. It’s extremism that manifests itself in two specific ways. One, insistence on extreme ideological commitments, right? Absolutely no compromise, whether right or left. But also extremism on the number of parties, having too many parties, a system where you get a plurality, even if it’s a small one, and then roll over all the other party leaders one by one, or alternatively, a system like the United States, like the United Kingdom, that has too few parties, and in which each of the two parties is so dependent on even fringe elements of their constituency, that there’s a high risk that a fringe element can take over that party, and then take over the government, which is the problem that we have experienced, beginning with the rise of the Trump era with the GOP. So you’re absolutely right. And this is part of the education that I keep coming back to. Just as presidential systems are profoundly flawed, virtually all of them, there are profoundly flawed parliamentary systems. Not all parliamentary systems are created equal. And one of the things I do in my book is explain how we can incorporate a particular kind of parliamentary system, which is called mixed member proportionality, and infuse it into our system in a way that hits that Goldilocks principle or sweet spot of roughly four to eight parties, which most political scientists think, number one, is kind of the golden system, the system that works the best, but also the right number of parties, not too few, not too many. And it allows parties to come together to negotiate toward what political scientists call the core. And the intuition here is that party leaders that are unwilling or unable to say, I will work with other party leaders, even if I have to give things up to create a governing coalition, parties unwilling to say that are not going to be successful in that system. And they shouldn’t be. But party leaders who are able to amass a significant following and convey that message, which will make elections so much more attractive, they will succeed. And who will really benefit? Because we don’t really care about political leaders benefiting. The American people will benefit because finally they will have a system that’s responsive to their desires and actually capable of delivering what Americans truly want without these pendulum swings left and right.

[00:26:28] Jeff Schechtman: I guess the other part of it is where the off-ramp is. How do you change a 250-year-old entrenched system? When we look at technology, we see that countries that develop technology late, third world countries, smaller countries, put in… cell phones became the standard. They didn’t have to wire the whole country because it was essentially a startup. We’re looking at a system that is so deeply entrenched, it’s hard to imagine the way that system begins to change.

[00:26:58] Maxwell Stearns: I love the analogy to technology. And I think you’re right. I think that there are, you know, it’s sometimes easier to start fresh than it is to adapt an older system. But let’s be honest, we can look at a lot of countries that have adopted relatively newer constitutions and have fundamentally failed. There are lots of countries, for example, that are called one and done countries. They adopt a beautiful sounding constitution. They have won election. And then that person basically creates a dictatorship and that’s the end of democracy. So we ought not to be envious of countries that have been unstable and have invited upon themselves an appearance of democracy that has ultimately failed, which has occurred too frequently all around the world. What I’ve tried to do in my book is to take very realistically the system that we have and to demonstrate how we can use three amendments, as I propose them in the book. And the number of amendments is not magical. These could all be combined into one complex amendment or be subdivided into two. The number is not the key. The substance is the key. Three fundamental modifications to our constitutional system: the way we elect the House of Representatives; the manner through which we select and hold accountable the president; and finally a mechanism to be able to remove a deeply problematic president. And I articulate them carefully in the book. I defend them, each getting an individual chapter. And just to make it crystal clear that I’m serious about this, I actually give drafts of each of the three amendments so that readers can see I’m not speaking in generalities. I’m speaking very precisely about a surgical intervention that will allow us to transform our broken system into a truly thriving multiparty democracy. And it can be done against the backdrop of the system that we have. But it requires, once again, education and it requires hope. And I can’t emphasize the hope point quite enough. People cannot despair. There’s too much at stake. America can be and should be a force for good, not just for its own citizens. It should be a source of inspiration for citizens around the globe.

[00:29:21] Jeff Schechtman: How do we get past the sense of American exceptionalism, and the way in which American exceptionalism, which so many people buy into, is in fact used as a blunt instrument to prevent change?

[00:29:36] Maxwell Stearns: So what I would say about that is, you can’t simply tell people to think differently. You have to challenge them in ways they can understand. And one of the things I’ve learned is when you challenge somebody at too high a level and it’s sort of an affront to their sense of identity, that’s a mistake. But when you focus on very specific propositions, it becomes irrefutable that some of the things that they thought were actually incorrect. For example, you can point out to people, you know, we have this intuition that we have a rock, paper, scissors constitution where jealousies are going to be aligned with the presidency, or with Congress, or with the Supreme Court. But let’s look at your experience. As you look at Congress, are you seeing that as the root source of the jealousies? Or are you seeing jealousies between the Democratic parties and Republican parties within each house of Congress and the party that’s aligned with the president tending to defend the president rather than hold the president accountable? Does that make you question the supposition that you learned in middle school about the beauty of the triangle drawn on the whiteboard that demonstrates this vision that the framers had of how our constitutional system was going to work? What about the Supreme Court? Is the Supreme Court really protecting our institutions? Or, based on who’s dominating the Supreme Court, are they acquiescing with respect to policies that seem to be historically inconsistent with the Constitution? And I go through these sorts of things in great detail in my book — which, by the way, is written for a general readership. It’s not written for academics. So I go through it piece by piece so that people can begin to understand that the things that they learned throughout their childhood might not be right. But the goal isn’t to bring people down, to embarrass people, oh, no, I understood things wrong. No. It’s to educate them so they come away with a sense of optimism and a deeper understanding, both of the great things that have happened in our history and the challenges that have happened in our history and how we can fulfill the promises of this country by doing a benign adaptation, just as we did when we rejected the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution and when we rejected the premises of the pre-Reconstruction Constitution through the fundamental changes brought about through the three Reconstruction Amendments, which really did transform relationships about how the government ultimately worked. We can do it again.

[00:32:29] Jeff Schechtman: Isn’t part of the problem raw power? Because we have a system that is built on this idea that if you can divide the other side and keep your side intact with power, you win.

[00:32:42] Maxwell Stearns: Oh, that’s precisely the problem. And that’s the reason we have a two party system, which the framers never envisioned. You can go all the way back to George Washington on that one. Right. I mean, George Washington’s farewell address lamented the rise of factionalism, which seemed fundamentally inconsistent with the story of benign jealousies among the three branches of government. So it’s precisely the fact that we have winner-take-all elections at every stage with respect to House districts, with respect to Senate elections, with respect to electoral college outcomes, that we end up with this two party system. That’s the lesson that American voters that have been raised on the notion of American exceptionalism need to understand. Why is it that although we’ve exported democracy around the globe, we haven’t exported that? The systems we’ve exported democracy to have embraced proportional representation and multi-party coalition governance, not winner-take-all elections. And people need to understand that. They need to learn it. They need to learn that not all parliamentary systems are created equal. The answer to my book is not to find the examples of parliamentary systems that I illustrate as a point of departure. I actually include examples of parliamentary systems that do not work well just to show how not to do it, as well as how to do it. People need to be educated. One of the things I do in the book is take readers on a virtual world tour to seven democracies to show what works well, what doesn’t work so well, and how we can take the most benign features and incorporate them as our own. Precisely to get past what you just said, Jeff, which is the winner-take-all notion of how to do governance, which was so profound in the State of the Union address last night. It was a pure example of winner takes everything and denigrates the other side.

[00:34:48] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about it in the context of the conflicts that are inherently built into the current system we have. Very Madisonian conflicts between the three branches of government and then between the federal government and the state governments. Those conflicts are inherent in the system.

[00:35:06] Maxwell Stearns: They are to an extent. That’s true. But frankly, as I tell my students when I teach constitutional law, the Federalist Papers belong in the fiction rather than the history section of the library. The mythology that we have these benign rivalries between the three branches of government and between the federal government and the states is really fictitious. Democratic leaders will support a Democratic president. Republican leaders will support a Republican president. That’ll be true whether they are aspiring Republican leaders in the state legislature or the state governor or whether they are Republican leaders in the House or in the Senate. The rivalries are ultimately between two parties. Of course, there are also some rivalries between and among the branches of government and between the levels of government. Federalism is real, but it’s not dominant. Separation of powers is real, but it’s not dominant. At best, this is part of a story that has been subordinated to power plays, typified by a two-party system in which each of the two parties is moving further and further apart. We are not living the Madisonian dream. We are living actually the antithesis of it, because Madison thought that the system he devised would break and control the violence of factions. That’s a quote from the Federalist 10. He just got it dead wrong. And as early as George Washington, that became clear. And since the 1840s, we basically entrenched an electoral system for the House of Representatives that solidified the inevitability of a two-party system. We’ve had periods in our history with more than two parties, but they’re transitional regimes going from one two-party system to another. This isn’t what the Framers had in mind. The Framers made profound mistakes. And we have to stop this kind of — and I don’t mean you, Jeff, obviously — but we have to stop this kind of religious devotion to praising the Framers for their brilliance and foresight when, frankly, they got things so wrong, they were wrong from the beginning. And what happened was that in the kind of information age, starting in the mid to early 1990s, it all began to really go off the rails. And we’re experiencing it on steroids now.

[00:37:37] Jeff Schechtman: And one of the things the Framers certainly didn’t imagine, and it’s kind of an overlay to everything we’re talking about, is the speed at which things happen today, the way that news and information travels, the way that technology has put everything on hyperspeed. All of that has an impact on governance.

[00:37:55] Maxwell Stearns: A hundred percent. And one of the other things I talk about in great detail in the book — in fact, I devote a chapter to it — is the role of social media in exacerbating our political divides. It’s a completely different world than the Framers could conceivably have envisioned. The two fundamental changes that really came about in the information age are hyperpartisan gerrymandering, which is a consequence of really advanced computing technology to divide voters in ways that benefit the party in power and state legislatures, and the social media algorithms that are dedicated ultimately to keeping people actively engaged on social media platforms. And what these two things do is they drive liberals further to the left, conservatives further to the right, and it creates this dynamic feedback loop between media, between citizens and politicians, driving the two extremes further and further and further apart. It is unsustainable, and we are in crisis, and it is serious. But I keep coming back to this, Jeff. It is fixable, provided we stop imagining that we can just do small tweaks as opposed to serious reform that really gets to the root assumptions of the original system that have failed us.

[00:39:25] Jeff Schechtman: And as somebody that spends a good part of your time with younger generations, is this something that can only be solved generationally? Are older generations too embedded in all that we’ve been talking about?

[00:39:37] Maxwell Stearns: Oh, we old people are stubborn. I can’t deny that. But I actually think we’re educable, too. I mean, I talk to audiences. I will say, over the last two years, I’ve spoken to such a broad range of audiences. I’ve spoken to red audiences, blue audiences, purple audiences, old audiences, young audiences. And very often, I’ll walk into a room, and my initial sense is that people are deeply skeptical of the message I have to convey. That is until they hear me talk. And that is until they have a chance to ask me questions. And then I talk to them at the end, and they say to me things like, you know, this is actually pretty serious. What you’re saying actually makes some sense. Or if they haven’t read it already, I really want to read your book. And I get emails from people from all over the country saying, I’ve read your book. This is really exciting. What can I do to help? Right? And sometimes it leads to me giving a talk. Sometimes it leads to me being interviewed. Right? Sometimes it leads to the person reaching out to me writing an article. Look, I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know when these reforms will take place. I don’t know when the inflection point is going to be that motivates serious change. I have no way to predict that. But here’s one thing I do know. We needed to have a book that would explain to people what went wrong and why, and how to fix it. Because without that, there wasn’t a basis for hope. And that’s really what I’ve decided to dedicate this part of my career to. Right? To conveying this message over and over again. And I don’t think that older people like us are incapable of being open to these ideas, at least not in my experience. I’ve talked to people older than me. I mean, I’m not kidding. I’ve talked to people in their 80s and 90s, one person who just turned 100, who was really excited about these ideas. You’d be surprised. I think people really are looking for meaningful solutions, things that don’t seem a fantasy. And I think we have to give it to them.

[00:41:48] Jeff Schechtman: The question is whether things have to get worse before they get better.

[00:41:52] Maxwell Stearns: And again, that goes back to my lack of a crystal ball. I don’t know. I can’t answer when the inflection point will be. I could imagine, for example, a pendulum swing the other way. I could imagine in the 1960s and 80s, we came actually fairly close to a call for a constitutional convention. That could happen again. The convention could throw out a whole bunch of ideas that absolutely won’t work. One of the things I’ve tried to persuade people is that rank choice voting, multi-member districts, term limits, these sorts of things, they’re superficially appealing, but they won’t solve the crisis that we have. Simply ending the electoral college in favor of a national popular vote, that won’t solve the problem either, and it might make it worse. I could imagine a constitutional convention throwing out a whole bunch of really bad ideas and Congress saying, hey, there’s this set of proposals that actually allows us, number one, to keep our jobs. Mine’s the only set of proposals that allows every sitting member of the House and Senate to keep their jobs in their existing districts and states. It doubles the size of the House, but sitting members keep their jobs. I could imagine saying, you know, instead of running the risk that those proposals, which would have the effect of taking us out of our jobs, threatening our continuing power, here’s a set of proposals that actually will fix the problem that they’re trying to fix and lets us keep our jobs. And if the consequence of that is that members of the House and Senate, who many people don’t like, get to become the heroes of democracy, let them be. I don’t care who claims credit. I just care that in the long run, we end up with a thriving multi-party democracy because that’s what American voters deserve, and that’s what’s going to make this country thrive, and that’s what’s going to allow us to actually meaningfully contribute to life in the United States for future generations.

[00:43:53] Jeff Schechtman: I’m just convinced of it. It’s ironic you talk about keeping their jobs, that things have gotten so bad and so ugly and so partisan that so many of them are giving up those jobs, as we’re seeing.

[00:44:04] Maxwell Stearns: Exactly, because they don’t have a system that allows them to reject the party line, have their integrity and keep their jobs. A multi-party system would allow people to have both their jobs and their integrity intact because they’d be able to disagree with party leaders with whom they strongly disagree on really salient points. We don’t have that. We have a leader of the country who will call out — I mean, just look what he did with the Supreme Court this week, saying that two of the justices that he appointed are embarrassments to their families because they read the statute, well, consistently with what the statute actually says. People don’t want to be called out and have themselves and their family members threatened because they disagree with an erratic leader. They’d rather quit. But we don’t have to live in that world. There’s a better world out there for us to live in. We can make it ours.

[00:45:06] Jeff Schechtman: Maxwell Stearns, his book is Parliamentary America, The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing a Broken Democracy. Max, I thank you so much for spending time with us.

[00:45:17] Maxwell Stearns: And I thank you so much for having me back. It has truly been a pleasure. Thank you.

[00:45:20] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.