Greatest Hit: David Faris - Are Democrats Presiding Over Their Own Demise?

**After a two month hiatus, Deep Dive returns next week (Sunday, Nov 26th) with a slew of new episodes with exciting, entertaining, and interesting guests. 

 In the meantime, in light of the recent polling suggesting that voters may return Donald Trump to the White House in next year’s presidential election, check out this Greatest Hit of Deep Dive, in advance of the 2022 midterm election, when the landscape also looked dire for Democrats.**

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What if the game of American politics is structurally rigged? Dr. David Faris, author of 'It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics', steps onto the stage in this episode to reveal the striking institutional disadvantages within our democracy. We dissect how Republicans have leveraged these disparities to gain power, and we question the true value of bipartisanship. David lays out a feasible roadmap for Democrats to counteract these imbalances, even if tactics seem a bit unorthodox.

Our dialogue doesn't stop there. We examine the distressing trend of presidents securing their seat in the Oval Office without the popular vote, and the impact this has had on the perceived legitimacy of our political system. By peeling back the layers of our Constitution, we attempt to understand how its outdated mechanisms have allowed such outcomes. Despite the evident structural deficits in the House and Senate, we discuss potential solutions such as the Fair Representation Act and the bold move of statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.

We wrap up our deep dive with an innovative exploration of political relocation, discussing the implications of planned mass migration of liberal voters to conservative states. Would flipping North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming really make a difference? As we navigate these thought-provoking avenues, we also touch on the potential overturning of Roe v Wade, the influence of language within politics, and the potential of a central coordinating mechanism to shift the balance of Senate seats. This conversation challenges conventional thought and presents new perspectives on the dynamics of American politics. Be sure not to miss it.

Recommended:
It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics - David Faris

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**Artwork: Dovi Design
**Music: Joystock

Transcript

David Faris: 0:00

Republicans have bent the Constitution to their will, because the Constitution is easy to bend. It's a flimsy document and you can read on your lunch break and it just simply does not contain many of the procedures or outline many of the procedures or define many of the procedures that govern day-to-day political activities in the Capitol. And so, definitely at this point, if you're a Democrat in office and you do not understand what's being done to you, I simply don't know what could open your eyes to that, if not what has transpired over the last four or five years. I mean, we haven't even talked about the insurrection yet. Right, it's like they literally tried to overthrow the government of the United States. So for them to go out and keep talking about it like it's the party you know. I just wish I could, just, like a lecture, shock them every time they say the words party of Lincoln.

Shawn: 0:54

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, Shawn Fettig. I'm a political scientist and I'm interested in how our governments and our politicians influence our lives, but also how our personal stories influence our politics. In this podcast, I may focus on topics in the news, but this is not punditry. Instead, I dive deep into issues and stories with my guests behind the headlines, beyond the basic narrative that's often crafted by the media and our politicians to help us better understand each other and why we think and feel the ways we do. Today I'm talking to Dr David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer at the Week. He is also the author of the book it's Time to Fight Dirty.

Shawn: 1:43

How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. It's become increasingly clear over the past couple of decades, but alarmingly so in the past 10 years, that Democrats have a structural and institutional disadvantage in the design of American democracy that requires they capture an almost super majority of the vote to obtain majority control of the federal government. A portion of seats in the Senate means that the two seats allocated to each small state, typically more conservative, have much more power than the two seats that are allocated to each large state, which are typically more liberal. Gerrymandering of house districts has given Republicans an advantage in packing Democrats in their states into a small number of districts, or spreading Democrats out, cracking them, salting them into Republican districts, thereby disenfranchising the voting power of their liberal voters. It's this gerrymandering that also influences the electoral college, which, if it isn't especially obvious today, given George W Bush's electoral college win in 2000 and Donald Trump's in 2016, despite both losing the popular vote, lacks a basic sense of fairness, and what it has meant is that Democrats have to garner a larger share of the vote than do Republicans to win the presidency.

Shawn: 3:02

Dr Faris recognizes how Republicans have exploited these inequalities to their advantage, and he chafes at the fact that they go beyond being just benign beneficiaries and instead Republicans actively bend rules and violate norms to grossly distort their advantage, to permanently relegate Democrats to representative minority, even if and when Democrats were to consistently win the popular vote. Republicans are meticulously and nefariously crafting a country in which they, the minority party, has exclusive control. In his book it's Time to Fight Dirty, dr Fa outlines a roadmap of sorts that, he argues, democrats need to employ yesterday if they want to save not just themselves but the country. So we talk about the state of these partisan politics, the structural disadvantages that Democrats are dealing with, some of his potential solutions if Democrats have squandered the slim sliver of control they gained in 2020, and what strategies are left if Democrats lose Congress in November and the presidency in 2024. Let's do a deep dive. Music, dr Faris, welcome. Thank you for being here. How are you?

David Faris: 4:20

I'm great, I'm great. How are you, son? Thank you for having me on the show.

Shawn: 4:23

Your book. It's Time to Fight Dirty. How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics.

Shawn: 4:29

Does something unique that I think most books that identify problems, especially in things like contemporary politics, policy, government fail to do, and that's to offer solutions viable, likely or not.

Shawn: 4:43

And they often offer some kind of platitudes that are unlikely, almost to the point of being comical, like, for example, american democracy is at death's door and what we need is moderate politicians that are willing to work on bipartisan solutions, period. And to me that's just a kind of stare and blink moment because, yeah, that'd be great but it's not going to happen, right, and I've almost gotten to the point where I just forego reading the final chapter of these books for that reason LAUGHING. So all of that is to say that your book was really satisfying for at minimum offering something that seems tangible, a potential, maybe viable road map for Democrats anyway, and, in a nutshell, you argue that Democrats need to start using some tools they have at their disposal, even if in the process of doing that, they upend some norms and even if it may sometimes feel a bit like unfair play, to maximize their electoral disadvantage in the American democratic structure. Do I characterize that correctly?

David Faris: 5:42

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know we had a long back and forth with the publisher about what to call this thing. I wanted to call it multiply and conquer and they wanted to call it it's time to fight dirty. And so that choice, I think, was the right choice for selling books. I think it has caused some confusion, slash, unwillingness for Democrats to be seen in public with it.

David Faris: 6:10

But definitely, yeah, I mean I think the premise of the book is how can we fix some of the structural imbalances that are kind of all working against Democrats right now without the fantasy of amending the Constitution.

David Faris: 6:24

You know, when you think about things like citizens united and abolishing the electoral college, you know these are things that really require a political alignment. That seems pretty farcical, at least in the near to medium term future, and so I wanted to think through what are some things that we could do if we ever won power again, just with laws, you know, what could Congress do and the president can sign it that could actually fix some of these problems, and you don't have to run afoul of the Constitution to do so. And you know some of them, as you noted, are more realistic than others. But I really wanted, particularly at the time when I conceptualized the book, which is right after Trump was elected, we're all very depressed Like why do we keep losing elections that we actually won and how do we fix that? And so that was the genesis of the book and I think you've got the core idea of absolutely correction.

Shawn: 7:21

You know, I would have this conversation with students as well kind of the structural inequity that, at least in contemporary times, disadvantages Democrats, and I would always struggle with language in. Especially in the last 20 years or so, we've seen almost like an acceleration of Democrats winning the popular vote but losing, you know, in the House, the Senate and the presidency for different reasons that I want to dig into in a second. But so it was difficult for me because it was difficult to say, by way of example, that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. He certainly, you know, won the Electoral College, but it's difficult to use that language of won the presidency, and I'm wondering if it's just so semantic that I'm just muddying something. That's beside the point. But do you think there's any space in here where language matters that maybe we could talk about this a different way when someone like Donald Trump wins without winning the popular vote?

David Faris: 8:23

I do. I mean, I'm somebody that really does. I do think language matters and I think we'll get into that a little bit later at more length in terms of when we think about how Democrats should be thinking about the Republican Party, talking about its threat to democracy and electoral practice that it poses right now, and I think that you can deploy language in a way that makes those differences clearer, makes those threats clearer, communicates both to the base and to people who are on the fence that Republicans are dangerous, right, at least this contemporary iteration of the Republican Party is extremely dangerous, and so, of course, I do think that you can talk about a popular vote loser who, quote unquote wins the presidency according to the extremely outdated mechanisms of our constitutional order, without talking about him like a normal president, especially because that was the second time this century that this has happened. As a consequence, five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by presidents who originally lost the popular vote for the presidency, and I think that that's a real problem, and I have had no issues at all referring to such a president as illegitimate and the power of the Supreme Court that it's currently wielding as illegitimate.

David Faris: 9:46

And when we talk about legitimacy. This is always a fun one to explain to students, right? You know, I'm not contesting by the idea that, like according to the laws of the country, donald Trump won the presidency fair and square. I think the laws of the country are illegitimate in the sense that they are increasingly perceived by those who are governed by them to be unjust. To me, legitimacy is a sort of a moral and normative concern, and not necessarily it has a legal dimension, right? But the legal dimension is not the only thing out there, and so I think that we have to talk really sharply. You know, the Democratic Party's instinct is always, I think, to look back to Al Gore presiding over his own loss in 2000 in the Senate and be like that was so brave, so courageous, and I think at least the base of the party now wants a more of a fighting spirit. When things like this happen, when our institutions fail us so badly that we are governed by someone that lacks majority support, I think that we should just come out and say that.

Shawn: 10:49

American democracy, or at least the structure of our American democracy, and so who wins elections, is pretty unique in developed democratic countries, and what I mean by that is we have this odd system wherein, occasionally, the unpopular vote getter wins right, and, as you said, we've seen an acceleration of that, or that's happened at least twice in since 2000. It makes me wonder two things. One is can we fairly say that a structure like this is democracy, at least as we understand democracy? And then the reason I ask that is because I wonder if we have put so much emphasis on our idea of a functioning democracy, on the end result and the end result up until at least about 2000, and definitely by 2016, was that it shook out, looking like a democracy right, that, even though we had this kind of odd structure that allowed for the occasional unpopular vote getter to win, it didn't happen that often, and so if we just looked at the result, it looks like a democracy, but when we look at the structure itself, regardless of result, it really looks like it's not a democracy.

David Faris: 12:07

Yeah, I think that that's a fair characterization. So I had just graduated college for the 2000 election and I was like an international relations compared to politics person. Throughout through college and into my PhD I was just kind of like an IR lifer. And I didn't, to be honest, in 2000, I really hadn't given the electoral college a ton of thought. I'm not even sure I had taken an American politics course at that point and I remember being shocked on election night like what the hell is this?

David Faris: 12:36

And so the Bush v Gore was, I think, that initial shot across the bow where people were confronted with the reality that the institutions themselves are not designed according to contemporary understanding of how democratic practice should be conducted. And I think that's how I would kind of put it. I'm a firm believer that democracy and authoritarianism are a spectrum and your country can be more or less democratic and still consider itself kind of a democracy. And that's kind of where I am with the United States, where I think that the citizens still we can change the executive leadership if we work around these sort of strange systems that we have. And the fact that Democrats are in power in all three branches the government right now is proof that that coalition can be cobbled together under the right circumstances. The reason I think that the US is a much more diminished democracy than some of its peer countries is precisely that lack of fit between electoral sentiment and electoral outcomes and the way that institutions designed a long time ago to meet very, very different problems than the ones that we have today, both socially, economically and politically a real obstacle to Democrats claiming power with a narrow edge in the popular vote. For you know, that's increasingly difficult to imagine and, yeah, that to me makes the country less democratic than a country that does not have these built-in biases for one party over the other.

David Faris: 14:15

I've struggled with how to think about the US.

David Faris: 14:20

One of the most fun things to do in an intro to American politics class is to tell everyone that America was not a democracy at all until 1965. You just see this look of shock in everybody's face because, to a very meaningful extent, high school students are taught to review the Constitution in the US, not just in Texas. I like everybody, it gets the same kind of context. That's just. I'm sure you know right, that's really hard to break through to offer students a real criticism of the structures that were put into place in the Constitution without saying I think the whole thing is trash and should be ripped up, but get them to engage in some real critical analysis of what are the flaws in the Constitution. I always love to use Dahl's how Democratic is the American Constitution as a sort of an accessible pathway into thinking about some of the ways that the original procedures of the Constitution were themselves deeply undemocratic, made it democratic for the time, but are deeply undemocratic according to the contemporary public's expectations of how our leadership should be elected and should govern.

Shawn: 15:27

You mentioned some built-in biases and we've talked about the electoral college, but what? Are some other built-in biases.

David Faris: 15:33

Well, sure, the biggest one is the US Senate. The US really kind of pioneered the idea of a bicameral legislature where each chamber would represent different interests or different factions of society or different political sovereignty. The problem that the Senate solved at the Constitutional Convention was the small states' worries that they would be overwhelmed by the larger states if power was distributed solely by population in a unicameral legislature that was apportioned according to how many people lived in the place. It's so hard for us to see things this way from the contemporary vantage point, but in 1787, virginia and Rhode Island and Massachusetts were much more distinct sovereign entities than they are today. Their leaders thought of themselves as potentially leaders of independent countries. There's really no guarantee that the convention would have worked if they couldn't have found these compromises, the compromise that they found to make Rhode Island happy. I like Rhode Island. I don't want to pick on Rhode Island. It's a nice place. But the compromise is to give all states equal representation in the Senate and to really iron that into the Constitution in a way that cannot really feasibly be changed. In my humble opinion, it's not even a matter of like. Can we amend the Constitution? It's like the Senate. It requires the consent of the smaller states to do away with equal representation in the Senate, and it's just never going to happen. So it's a huge bias.

David Faris: 17:10

I think at the time the difference in population between Virginia and Rhode Island, while significant, was not as significant as the difference between, say, california and Wyoming. Today there's 38 million people in California, there's 600,000 people in Wyoming, give or take, and they get the same two senators. And that means that people in Wyoming, through no fault of their own, okay, but people in Wyoming have more political power than people in California do. The Supreme Court in fact ruled that a Senate-like arrangement at the state level is unconstitutional. In other words, you can't draw the districts to be unequal in population because that violates the Constitution. And yet we have one of the core features of the Constitution that seems to violate the Constitution, and that's the Senate.

David Faris: 18:00

And as time has gone on and some of this was actually deliberate, done by the Republican Party in the late 19th century, but we have just we admitted many states into the Union that are remote and not very densely populated, thinking about North and South Dakota, which is absolutely no reason for two states to exist there, wyoming and Montana, the states of the plains and the mountain west were drawn deliberately to increase Republican representation in the Senate under obviously very different political and party circumstances. But that's what was done, and the end result today is that the Senate has a natural Republican bias of anywhere from like three to five points. So, in other words, democrats would need to win the popular vote overall for Congress quite substantially to have any hope of getting a majority in the Senate, and even that would depend on which of the cycles that the Senate is in. So the Senate is elected in three classes over the course of six years, and if you get a bad map, even a great political year is not enough to deliver power to you. And that was 2018, where Democrats won the overall vote for the House by eight and a half points and lost seats in the Senate. That's how deeply biased the institution is against Democrats right now.

David Faris: 19:29

It wasn't designed to be biased against Democrats right Like Democrats and Republicans did not exist in 1787.

David Faris: 19:37

But I do think that it was designed with the intention of granting smaller states and less well populated states an equal seat at the table with the larger states, so they couldn't just get run over by them and we no longer really have a problem of states like not wanting to be part of the United States, and so the Senate the problem that the Senate was created to resolve no longer exists, I guess is the way I would put it, and mostly Republicans have come up with elaborate new justifications for the Senate that don't make any sense, and that's where we are.

David Faris: 20:14

The Senate really gives the Republican Party a leg up. It's a huge obstacle for Democrats to get anything done, and then you layer on top of that natural bias a thing that we really do just do to ourselves, which is the filibuster. It's just a Senate rule, not in the Constitution, that requires 60 votes to get almost anything done, and so we've been sitting around for the last two years with this razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate, incapable of passing almost any legislation, because two out of their 50 members are wedded to the idea that they don't want to do anything if they can't get 10 Republicans to come along with them, and, lo and behold, almost nothing has gotten done. So the Senate is just a huge, huge problem, and I think after the electoral college, or maybe even before the electoral college, I think it's probably our biggest challenge moving forward.

Shawn: 21:09

So that's a backdrop and as a segue then to maybe some solutions for Democrats. So for decades, democrats have been advocating for something like a return to collegiality or comedy or respect or, I guess, norms, while at the same time Republicans would be going to war, and to my mind they've been completely transparent about it. Newt Gingrich wasn't going out of his way to hide what he was doing in the 90s. So are Democrats being played for fools?

David Faris: 21:38

Yeah, of course. It's just so astonishing to me that there are still Democrats in office right now who don't get this. I mean, in Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann's book it's even worse than it looks. It's a decade old now. They wrote that thing which painted the Republican Party as an extremist outlier and willing to compromise on major issues and sort of bent on seizing power at any cost. They wrote that four years before Trump, and so we've lived through so many episodes of Republican-led unilateral escalation.

David Faris: 22:18

There was the blockading of the Supreme Court seat that opened up during Obama's last year in office. There was the changing of that rule on the eve of the 2020 election so that they could hand Mamie Coney Barrett onto the court After, with Bader Ginsburg had her untimely death. There was the Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, so it's like that's just the court. There is the abuse of executive oversight power to spend years digging through the minor tragedy of Benghazi for some kind of political dirt that they could hang on their opponents. There is the, I think, the unfolding and escalating refusal of any Republicans to cooperate with Congress and its oversight powers at all, and what these things all have in common is that there's nothing in the letter of the law of the Constitution that says they have to. Republicans have bent the Constitution to their will because the Constitution is easy to bend. It's a flimsy document and you can read on your lunch break and it just simply does not contain many of the procedures or outline many of the procedures or define many of the procedures that govern day-to-day political activities in the Capitol. And so definitely at this point, like if you don't understate your Democrat in office and you do not understand what's being done to you, I simply don't know what could open your eyes to that, if not what has transpired over the last four or five years. I mean, we haven't even talked about the insurrection yet, right, right, it's like they literally tried to overthrow the government of the United States. So for them to go out and keep talking about it like it's the party.

David Faris: 24:00

I just wish I could just like elect show, shock them every time they say the words party of Lincoln, every time Nancy Pelosi goes in public and says how we really, really need a good Republican party. It's really important for us to have a strong Republican party. It's like Nancy. No, it's actually not.

David Faris: 24:18

It would be really great if there was not a strong Republican party, and so the rhetoric coming out of the Democratic party is still mostly with a few exceptions desire to work with Republicans, desire to get things done by partisanship, delivering for people against extremism and all those forms. And Republicans are just like Democrats, are radical socialists. They are sick groomers Like. The language that Republicans use against Democrats is just wildly disproportionate in its sort of sharpness and vitriol compared to what the way that most Democrats speak about their opponents and I don't want them to go around calling Republicans pedophiles who are grooming children that's not what I want to bring into our politics.

David Faris: 25:10

But I do think that Democrats need to speak more openly about what the Republican party has become and a good epithet to hang on the party that should come out of everyone's mouth when the word Republican is spoken. It should not be spoken without the word reactionary authoritarianism. I'll leave it to the focus group makers to figure that out, but I do think that there is even just watching TV and watching representatives speak in contemporary Washington is enough for everyone to see the asymmetry in our politics. Right like that, republicans understand that they have a structural advantage that they can do things that are deeply alienating to the public and still win power anyway. Because of these, because of the way the Constitution is structured and it has given them license to act and behave and govern in ways that almost close off the possibility of bipartisan cooperation and bipartisanship.

David Faris: 26:12

And I would love to deprogram everyone who believes in bipartisanship as a value, because I don't think it's important at all If you just simply cleared out a couple of these obstacles and just let majority's govern, especially when there's unified government in Washington, like obviously, when one branch of Congress is controlled by one party and the presidency by another. You have to have some compromise unless you just want to have a year's long standoff. We had that in Illinois from 2014 to 2018. We had this huge Democratic majority in the legislature and a Republican governor who simply did not want to compromise, and so we didn't even have a budget for years. It was horrible. So of course, there are circumstances in which the parties must cooperate, but the kind of fetishization of bipartisanship as the ultimate goal of politics, rather than getting our policies put into place that we promise to the voters, is almost like a uniquely Democratic disease at this point that is no longer shared by Republicans.

Shawn: 27:15

One of the arguments you hear from at least a particular class of Democrats and by that I mean you have your old school, your new school and I think a counter argument to what you're saying, at least from the old school is that the norms that have been established in our governing system are important to maintaining a functional American democracy, and we could pick apart what that even means. But if, then, democrats were to begin doing the same thing that Republicans have been doing which for Republicans means gaming the system and leveraging the advantage that they have to exploit weaknesses in the American Democratic structure to their benefit that if Democrats did the same thing, that it would hasten a disintegration of our Democratic infrastructure To some degree? That's the argument that senators mansion and Senate will make right. What's your response to that?

David Faris: 28:06

Sure, that's a great question and it comes up in the context of norms. I think it also comes up in the context of expanding the Supreme Court laterally on a partisan basis, which is one of the chapters of the book. That's usually the question that gets posed to me on the other end, and I think I would kind of turn it around and say what is your vision of how one party's escalating normative, procedural, constitutional hardball, combined with sort of rhetorical outbidding in the way that Republicans now describe Democrats as almost illegitimate and sort of unworthy of holding power at all? How does that dynamic get reversed if Democrats kind of keep getting just kind of rolling over for it? It would be one thing if this now decade-long Democratic commitment to upholding these norms, at least at the leadership level, was working. If mansion and Senate got in there and they were like nothing's getting done without 60 votes and then a bunch of stuff got done with 60 votes, I'd say okay, maybe they're right, maybe this is how the institutions had functioned. They were able to convince 10 of their colleagues to come along with them and pass some common sense legislation to fix a set of agreed-up problems that we may not see eye to eye about, but that we can meet in the middle on, and I think that that's how many Americans would like politics to work in our country, and so it's disappointing that that's not what's happening, but my argument is always that, in order to come down from the brink of whatever it is that we're on the brink of here and to get Republicans to stop doing these things, to come do a series of compromises about these very issues, like I'm thinking of a world in which we could agree to amend the Constitution to impose term limits on the Supreme Court, because everyone sees that these confirmation battles are like a nightmare for our politics, but they're never going to get to that point if we don't threaten the escalation in the first place.

David Faris: 30:18

So it's just like again, if you think about the full context of what Republicans did on the Supreme Court of the last six years. That is, they shrunk the court right. They manipulated the size of the court. There were eight justices for a whole year when Scalia died in 2016. They set aside the filibuster to put Neal Corsage and Brett Kavanaugh on the court, and then they changed their own rule on the eve of the 2020 election. Remember the way that they justified the not putting garland on the court was like no Supreme Court picks in an election year, and then in 2020, it becomes no well, it's all about whether you control the Senate. So Supreme Court in an election year, that's fine, as long as the president's party has the Senate and no one wants to say this out loud. But we really reached the point where it's like, oh, I'm going to get out of here. And we really reached the point where it's like obvious that no one is getting a Supreme Court pick unless their party controls the Senate. Like that's just.

David Faris: 31:20

I don't still think it's ever going to happen again and Republicans are going to keep doing this stuff to us if we don't, if Democrats don't kind of fight back on equal footing. And I think it would be instructive for Republicans to have experienced court expansion over the last two years, heading into their next round of being in office, if that's what's going to happen in November. And I don't think that Republicans have been hit with a comparable escalation, a comparable retaliation for most, I wouldn't say all. There have been a couple of retaliations, but they're now close to a decade old, but they really haven't been hit with anything in kind and that, to me, some people would see that as Democrats standing firm on principle, and then that's great and it's healthy for our democracy and it's generational for people.

David Faris: 32:11

But that's just not how it's being received by the public. I think the public mostly doesn't care about any of this stuff. Most people don't know what the filibuster is, they don't know how it works, they don't know that you know, the nine justices is not a number. That's in the Constitution. And I think that Democrats could probably get away with a lot of this stuff if they just did it and do what Republicans did, which is just go out and defend it in public Like, yeah, you're right, we did expand the Supreme Court. We're stopping us from doing that and that's what we did. So that's a long answer to your question Shawn .

Shawn: 32:46

No, I like a long answer. In not doing so, are then Democrats just presiding over their own demise?

David Faris: 32:52

Yes, that's sort of exactly what's happening right now. I think that there's the potential for Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema to be seen by people in the future as as much as anybody can be single-handedly responsible for major historical events, like as a single-handedly responsible for the decline or possible destruction of American democracy. You know, brackets right Like this is a diminished democracy, but these two might be responsible for destroying what's even left of that, and that is we are in power and we are doing nothing, nothing to fix either the structural deficits that Democrats face that are not justifiable according to small D Democratic theory, and we're also not doing anything to shore up the system in advance of what is like a you know, an open plot to overthrow or to undermine the 2024 elections. It's unfolding in plain sight According to the people who are doing it. They're not hiding anything about this plot and, yeah, democrats are just sitting on their hands and it's frustrating to talk about, because I actually think for some of these things, you know 46, 47, 48, democrats in the Senate get it, almost all Democrats in the House get it, I think you know they passed the House, passed DC statehood, they passed sweeping voting rights reforms. I think that they are moving towards some sort of action on Puerto Rico statehood.

David Faris: 34:19

Do I think court expansion would come out of this house?

David Faris: 34:21

No, but I think that a majority of the party is behind a lot of these ideas, and the real inaction on all of this is the fault of like two or three people in the party, and they're going to take the whole party down with them.

David Faris: 34:34

I mean just people, just most people, just don't pay close enough attention to politics to know exactly which figure in Washington is responsible for the lack of fulfilling campaign promises, or even forget campaign promises, just like anything other than sending aid to Ukraine Doesn't seem to have a path out of the US Congress right now. And so, yeah, in a very meaningful sense, it's like Republicans have told us what they're going to do. They have shown us that they are willing to play constitutional hardball and beyond. I would add that they have no meaningful respect for electoral democracy itself, that they are planning some kind of extra judicial or extra constitutional power grab in 2024. And I think that there's a real risk that it'll work and that Democrats will be seeing at least this version of the Democratic Party will be seeing for a very long time as having let it happen even though they knew it was happening to them, and it's really frustrating, to put it.

Shawn: 35:39

So, you mentioned a couple of these, the statehood for Puerto Rico and DC. But what are some solutions for Democrats?

David Faris: 35:46

that to you seem viable?

David Faris: 35:50

Sure, I mean, when I was thinking about these questions, sitting down to write the book again, there's a certain genre of like what was it called magical thinking about American democracy.

David Faris: 36:01

That happens where people are like, wow, let's dream big. Like imagine if we could sit down and just do this all from scratch, what kind of democracy would you design? And let me tell you, I would love to sit down and just rewrite the Constitution from scratch, but it's not going to happen. And so the, the, the load star of the book was a set of solutions that where there is no meaningful constitutional obstacle to those things happening. In other words, how can we fix the Democrats deficit in the Senate without abolishing the Senate and without taking away equal representation from the states? Like, how can the how can the anti big D Democratic bias in the chamber be fixed? And that kind of stipulates that like you can't fix, there's no, there's no real way to fix the small D Democratic problem in the Senate, but we can only fix the big D Democratic problem in the Senate. And so my solution has always just been more states and, starting from the reality, that, like if they were like a way for Republicans to bring in new territories as states that would vote overwhelmingly Republican, like it would have happened 40 years ago. And so we have Washington DC, which is a city of 700,000 people that has no not only is not a state, has no representation at all in Congress, no voting representation. They have two like fake senators that run around calling themselves senators, who are like I don't know, they're like the bat boys of Senate right, like they're taller people, like oh yes, this is the quote unquote senators in DC letterman. All right, they have Eleanor Holmes Norton, who's amazing as a, as the non voting member of the of the House of Representatives, but she has no power, and I think it's a real achievement for for her and her movement that they finally got DC statehood passed through the House, which is which is a huge step towards rectifying that problem.

David Faris: 38:00

So another another thing I really was committed to for the book Shawn was like I didn't really want to wreck it, I didn't want to recommend anything that I thought was truly wrong. You know what I mean. Like it's like I want to fix these problems, but I don't want Democrats to go out and lie. I want to fix these problems, but I don't actually want Democrats to like rig the system in their own benefit, right, like that is not what I want to do. And so somebody somebody had an idea of you know admitting every neighborhood in DC as a state. And then you know, like I don't know 100, you know 100 new states and then using that new super duper majority in the Senate to abolish itself or something. I'm like you know, no, let's not do that. But what we can do is we can, we can admit new states, that all that crisis is an act of Congress, and then it's done. And so I recommended statehood for DC. That's to slam dunk Democratic senators.

David Faris: 38:58

The situation in Puerto Rico is also, I think, deeply indefensible from a moral and small D Democratic perspective. For American citizens in Puerto Rico to have no voting representation in Congress is just, you know, I think you can see in the sort of the hurricane response problem in 2017, the way that not having that representation is really not in the interests of the people of the island and I wouldn't want to impose data on them and I think that we need to approve in a referendum and I don't think that those I don't think those voters are as slant nearly a slant on Republican as DC, but I think in most normal election years, puerto Rico would probably send Democrats to the Senate. So that gets forced. I'd like. I'm okay, just tally it up right. That's, that's four seats. I think Democrats have a structural deficit of, like you know, four to six seats in the Senate, just in terms of the way that the states are voting right now, and so I think that that gets us to even or close to even.

David Faris: 40:00

And there are further things that we could do if we really wanted to play creative hardball, and that would be to break up California into a number of states the five, six, seven, whatever we want to come up with, because it really is nuts that Democrats win by 25, 30 points every year in California and that's the largest state by far in the country, the most populated state, and they get two senators. I think that that's unjust, I think that I don't want 100 Californians, right. But even breaking it into seven, there'd still be a lot of states that are smaller than all of those seven Californians. So to me that's fine, and that move would make it, I think, quite difficult for Republicans to win the Senate and I'm okay with that too, again unless they want to come to the table for a compromise. Right Like DC and Puerto Rico, I think that should have been done on the first day. Right Like that's those? To me those are no-brainers. The manipulating jurisdiction sizes and changing state boundaries stuff falls into the category like same bucket as court expansion, where I'm like maybe if we just if we take, if we go 90% of the way towards doing this, it could trigger talks around a compromise. But I wish I'd be willing to go through with it. Yeah, so that's a way to fix the structural imbalance in the Senate.

David Faris: 41:21

There's also a democratic problem in the House of Representatives as a consequence of how we draw our districts. America, as Dave Daley likes to say, the only country in the world that lets its politicians pick their own voters, and so every 10 years you have partisan legislatures and partisan governors in most states not all states, but most states drawing these district boundaries in a way to disadvantage their opponents, and you can see the long-term consequences of this both at the state level and the national level. Our neighbors to the North here in Wisconsin Democrats in Wisconsin functionally cannot get rid of the Republican legislature there Like they just. They cannot get it done and that is because the Republicans have gerrymandered the state legislature to within an inch of its life and Democrats would need like 68% of the vote or something to win power in the state legislature. That's just, it's just incredibly undemocratic, and those procedures are used in various forms for the whole country and as a consequence of Republican willingness to use hardball where we are not. That means that the House also has a Republican skew that you could fix with a variety of things, like you could outlaw gerrymandering with an act of Congress. That's great, I think. Over the last year I think we've seen some of the ways that our parties have done and runs around these nonpartisan redistricting commissions right Like Ohio Republicans just ignored it, florida Republicans just ignored it, and, of course, democratic judges are like no, we have to abide by these procedures in New York. And so what you have is you have now extreme gerrymanders in a lot of Republican states that are not met with any extreme gerrymander in the Democratic states, except for the one that I'm sitting in right now, illinois, so you can outlaw gerrymandering.

David Faris: 43:14

I'm personally skeptical that human beings can design a nonpartisan redistricting procedure that is Republican proof. I'm not sure that can be done, and so I'm a big proponent of the Fair Vote Act sorry, the Fair Representation Act, which is the brainchild of an organization called Fair Vote and it would use ranked choice voting to elect members of the House of Representatives. And instead of our 435 single districts, it would create a series, except in the states with only one member of the House. It would create a series of three or five person districts. That would be I don't know, I would say un-gerrymanderable, but they would be almost un-gerrymanderable, as I think would dramatically reduce any potential bias in the chamber. And I layer on top of like I kind of just endorsed that plan in the book. I'm like that's great.

David Faris: 44:05

It's not the system I would design from scratch.

David Faris: 44:07

That's Germany's mixed member proportional system.

David Faris: 44:09

I think it's probably the best thing that's out there right now, but I think that's going to work here for a variety of reasons.

David Faris: 44:15

So you do that. I think you should double at least the size of the House, because 700,000 citizens per member of the House is just not a recipe for a responsive legislature, and making it quite a bit larger, I think, would make it marginally harder to gerrymander anyway, even if you do nothing else. So that's a way around the problem in the House and it's another thing that I think has gained at least the ranked choice of voting. End of it has gained a lot of momentum in the last four or five years in the party itself trying to bring at least ranked choice voting as a reform to the states for their federal races, which, if nothing else, would eliminate the spoiler effect of third party candidates, as we saw in the main congressional race in 2018, where a Democrat won the seat according to ranked choice voting. They didn't get the most first choice votes, but when they redistributed those lesser candidates second preferences, the Democratic candidate won, and I think that's a great outcome for democracy.

Shawn: 45:17

You mentioned ranked choice voting as being one that seems to have gained some momentum, some traction. Are there others that are receiving actionable attention, more so than like? To me, california is an exciting option, right, or it seems like an exciting proposition, but it feels like it would require Californians to be on board. And there's just this. You know, california is proud to be California right. And I'm just wondering like how much traction that would gain among the populists in California.

David Faris: 45:49

It's a tough sell. I would say that was like by far the most badly received idea in the book. Really, is that true In terms of like, just no one took it seriously. You know they're like, oh, what a cool idea. But no, and people in California were like what are you talking about, dude? No, we don't want to do this. Like who would get the state university systems? And you know it would create a long. It would create a long Brexit like headache for California to actually divide itself into seven pieces.

David Faris: 46:18

That it's really hard to imagine the voters of the state endorsing that plan, because I think the need for it is only going to be obvious after we lose power. Yeah, and once we have lost power, you can't do that because you need Congress to approve the whatever plan California comes up with in the state legislature to divide itself into however many pieces. It's not fantastical, I think, to think that California could be broken up into two or three pieces rather than many, many attempts to at least separate out, you know, north and the northern and southern parts of California or the divided in three. That, I think, has some support, especially from Republicans, if you could convince them that they're going to get a state out of this. You know just the northeast parts of the state in particular, but other parts of the state that are towards the eastern borders there's a real Republican sentiment to get out of California, right. So it's like, okay, well, let's break it up into eight pieces, give Republicans one state and take seven for ourselves. Look, everybody wins, we're all happy, right. But there's been no, I don't think there's been any meaningful movement towards anything like that since I wrote the book One.

David Faris: 47:29

You know one idea that I was really pleased to see take off, at least in the sort of movement progressivism is expanding the Supreme Court. You know court packing. When I was drafting the book. My wife is a lawyer and she at the time she was clerking on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. When I was kind of kind of come up with a framework of the book and we remained friends with a couple of people that she clerked with and I remember this dinner party with her what are you working on, david? And I said, okay, we're going to this book about institutional electoral reform. She's like, oh, tell us about it.

David Faris: 48:03

And I, you know, they were like, oh, sounds interesting, that's cool. And then I got to court packing and they were like what? No, that's crazy. And I think that the you know he just the additive nature of like it's a Gorsuch, kavanaugh, barrett. The gerrymandering, terrible gerrymandering decision. The public union decision that came out of Supreme Court. The potential overturning of Roe v Wade that looks more likely than not to happen this summer. The fact that Supreme Court's about to make, you know, carrying a concealed weapon easier all across America in the wake of a bunch of mass shootings.

David Faris: 48:37

Over time, people have really come around on this idea to the point where, like I was watching the Democratic primary debates in 2019 and thinking like it does actually really seem like a couple of people have gotten a hold of my book, so that was cool to see. Again, it's like these things take time. The Federalist Society built their vision for the Supreme Court and it took 40 years and now they've got it right. But the idea that we're going to build a movement for Supreme Court expansion and conceptualize it and execute it in the span of four years is probably never very realistic. But I do think that there's a lot more support for making significant changes to the Supreme Court than there was when the book came out, and so that's been, it's like, obviously disappointing that it's not happening, and but it's also great to see that it's kind of it's like in the hopper right In terms of things that progressives are talking about as a way to solve some of these problems.

Shawn: 49:30

There are also some things that you come out against as possible tools that Democrats could use to kind of fortify a majority, and two of them are actually things that I need a little bit of convincing that they are so horrible. So one is revisiting judicial review. So this is something that the court kind of gave to itself in my review, madison in 1803, it's a power that in that case the court established for itself and we've kind of established that as a norm, and that is that they will be the final arbiters of determining what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional. And in its time to fight dirty, you take a pretty strong stand against this. And the another is perhaps this idea that maybe we do let conservatives you know, we do give conservatives free reign to establish their kind of legislative agenda and enact their policies and let people see how dismal that society is. And you address this in its time to fight dirty as well, arguing against it.

Shawn: 50:30

So I'm wondering one, why specifically these sit so poorly with you? But two have you revisited these?

David Faris: 50:39

since writing the book. Yeah, this is a really great question, and so you know my thinking on some things has changed since 2017, when I wrote this thing. So let me take the second thing first, which is to sort of like letting people see the horror of Republican rule. You know, sort of a modified version of the. I don't remember this blue exit article that came out right after Trump was elected, where it was just like yeah, just let's just pack it up and get out of here. Right Like let's agree to dismantle the social security system and just like rebuild it at the state level where we have power. And I have two responses right Like one, letting Republicans win and hoping for this sort of like, I don't know, heighten the contradictions. Reaction from the public seems not to be in keeping with how people react to bad news and the way that people allocate blame for things.

David Faris: 51:30

So I could see a situation where Republicans come into power and they make the healthcare system worse and they worsen inequality, but they figure out a way to wander some reticulous explanation for it through Fox News and Breitbart, and then you know, and then a close to majority of the country is convinced that either the policies are working or the reasons the policies aren't working is because of Democrats, or we need we haven't gone far enough, right, like, oh for sure, people have like an almost endless capacity to justify their beliefs and things, even when they are confronted with contradictory evidence. There was a great book that came out a few years ago, kind of right around the time that Trump was elected, and we were all like reading this kind of stuff and that was our uh, strangers in their Own Land, and it was about it was the sociologist Talks child. Yes, yeah, yeah. But what a fascinating book, right. And she went down and she lived in rural Louisiana, got to know people and she would go to a town where it's like this company had just like totally wrecked the landscape and the environment and destroyed people's lives, and those people still found a way to blame it on the federal government, you know.

David Faris: 52:38

And so in my mind I sat through the the first year of COVID thinking incompetence at this level, right, like Donald Trump, just like ignoring the pandemic, flouting the common sense procedures that we were using to try to prevent the spread of COVID, politicizing everything, like getting into fights with Democratic governors about COVID, you know, essentially sidelining his own public health team in the US, then ending up with a much, much worse death rate, at least in the first year of the pandemic, than anybody else had. I was like if anything could break the partisan stalemate in this country. It's like mass death caused by the party and power right, and it just didn't happen. Like, yes, we won power right, but barely by the skin of our teeth and it seemed like the polls were wrong the whole time by three or four points and he almost won again. You know, and I just the lack of wholesale repudiation of Trump in that particular time period has really kind of undermined my faith or my belief that there's any amount of Republican misrule that could kind of force people to enough people to confront their own beliefs and change those things.

David Faris: 53:51

So that's what I'd say about that. I'd also say, you know, even in the story where four years of Republican misrule ultimately leads to us winning huge majorities in Congress, it's like we still have to live through those four years, yeah, and a lot of people are going to suffer through them, and it's just it's hard for me to endorse that as something that we're aiming for. It's like it's something that I hope it's like. You can be hopeful that that'll happen if Republicans do win power. Right, but it's not something I think that we should necessarily be working towards, or you?

David Faris: 54:22

know, Sorry, what was the first one again, Shawn.

David Faris: 54:26

I essentially eliminating judicial review, judicial review yes, thank you. So this is the one that I'm honestly just really torn about it. I mean, I do think that there's a sense in which democratic systems need some way to have a final resolution of a major, serious dispute, especially as it pertains to the US Constitution. And since I published the book, I would say my faith in judicial review is definitely diminished and I've had nights where I'm tweeting out things like burn the Supreme Court to the ground, you know, just because I'm so angry in the moment about what's happening. But I think that there are other.

David Faris: 55:04

I do think there's things that there are happy mediums here, like you could, for certain kinds of decisions. I think I'm thinking especially of overturning an act of Congress. You could impose super majority requirements of seven votes on the chamber, eight votes. You could impose a unanimity requirement to overturn an act of Congress, and that, I think, would you think about all the things that require super majorities in the US constitutional order, including changing the Constitution itself, and yet the Supreme Court can operate with these simple partisan majorities to make very sweeping changes to American society. I'm not loving it anymore and I think that you could rewrite the rules of the chamber or even again, I do like to stay away from amend the Constitution arguments, but you can amend the Constitution to do this.

David Faris: 55:49

I do think the Constitution should be amended to make the Supreme Court's powers and structure clear in the powers of the president and the Senate much clearer, possibly altered in a variety of ways. But abolishing the judicial review altogether, I think would be so disruptive as to lead, I think it would be a real contributing factor to the breakup of the country, because one states know they can do whatever they want and you're just down to kind of brute force in terms of who gets what. I think I'm still in a place where I prefer to avoid completely doing away with judicial review, if we can avoid that, although I am hoping that some blue state governors decide to defy the Supreme Court on a variety of things that's going to be coming down in the next couple of years. So we'll set to see about that.

Shawn: 56:36

You wrote it's time to fight dirty before the 2020 election, before the end of Trump presidency, before the reshaping of the Supreme Court and in that 2020 election, democrats took Congress and the presidency, which gave them, in actuality, two years to enact some pretty significant fixes. So I guess the question is have they squandered it and, if so, what does that portend?

David Faris: 56:59

Sure, I mean they have squandered it. I mean it's not over yet, right, and we haven't lost the November elections until we've lost them, and there's still plenty of time for the national environment to be changed. I'm just skeptical of what could change it in a way that the voters are inclined to punish the minority party instead of the majority party. I think that's something is the Supreme Court. If anything is going to shake the race up at this point, it's Roe v Wade being overturned. This kind of gets at your last question right. It's like what if we could win really sweeping power by having abortion be illegal in 30 states for two years? It's like a lot of people are going to suffer on the way to that right, but it is something that could shake up the national environment in a way that could benefit Democrats. But if they in fact lose their congressional majorities in November, they will have 100% completely squandered the opportunity either to shore up democracy, put up new guardrails, make some modest or sweeping adjustments to the institutions that are disadvantaged in them in a pretty obvious way, and so it's obviously been extremely disappointing to me that Manchin and Sinemuses cannot be moved by anything to get on board with some of this stuff, and so it forces us to think about well, what is the path forward here?

David Faris: 58:20

If we do lose in November and all these problems really got fixed, what do we do about all this? Right, the problem in the Senate might likely to get worse over time. How are we going to fix these problems? And I'm working on a book proposal about that, but with a bunch of ideas that I think, to be honest, are like break up California level of likeliness, including moving people around.

David Faris: 58:49

Our biggest problem right now is we have, like I don't know, 10 million excess voters in California who could be used elsewhere to flip two Senate seats in a bunch of different states, and so some kind of project to get Democrats to move to some of these places and to try to shift the politics from within. That requires a kind of central coordinating mechanism and a lot of money and a lot of time. But it's hard to see how these problems. If Democrats will not act when they are in office, if Republicans, as I'm sure they, will make it harder for Democrats to get back in office in the first place, if democracy even exists after 2024, what are we going to do about it? And so that's a conversation everyone on the left is going to have to have. If the elections go the way that we fear. We're all going to have to sit down and think about what the path forward is, and I would really be lying to you if I said I had any easy answers about that.

Shawn: 59:42

You know I guess this is an aside I had a conversation recently with the executive director of Boulder County. It's an organization that focuses on support and advocacy for queer folks and she had said that, you know, given what's happening in a number of states but Texas and Florida are great examples with their kind of you know, the don't say gay and the anti-trans in Texas not legislation but kind of directive at any rate, you know she said they've been receiving calls from families in some of these states asking if there's any support for them to relocate to Colorado or otherwise friendly states and she said she's really struggles with this, because what happens if everybody leaves? If everybody leaves, you know, texas, florida, fill in your red state. Here are we just making those shittier places to live, right, by packing ourselves into, you know, increasingly smaller geographic spaces?

David Faris: 1:00:45

Yeah, I mean, it's this. This gets this point gets raised a lot in the UK and the context of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, people on the English left are like no, no, no, if you leave, like we're all alone here, we'll get crushed by conservatives in every single election for the next 50 years. Please don't leave us. And so every time, you know I think I've a couple of times gotten on online and mused about how like look, wouldn't we all be happier if we broke this country into like four different countries? And I would really argue against the basic logic of that. And you know the Democrats in the South, friends who are at universities in Alabama, mississippi, these kind of places, are like no, please don't leave us. You know like, can we stay? Please just stay and fight. And so it's. You know the reality is there is no right now, there's no organization.

David Faris: 1:01:37

I think seriously trying to do like a mass relocation from some of these states, that could happen, depending on how bad things get. For my money, I would. If Democrats are going to abandon Texas, I would like to see them go to North and South Dakota, montana and Wyoming, because you could flip all four of those states for a total of two million new people, not two million a piece. You move two million people around, you get eight Senate seats and four House seats. I don't know how many House seats we'd give up in Texas in order to make that happen, but it would really help with the electoral college and it would help with the Senate.

David Faris: 1:02:13

But it's like you know, when you start talking about these things, you're like is this science fiction? Is this really realistic? Are people really going to uproot themselves from their families for politics? I mean, somebody like me, maybe, but your ordinary rank and file Democrats who show up on election day but aren't consumed by politics. Are they really going to wake up one day and be like yes, I will have the Democratic Relocation Committee sell my house and buy me property in Wyoming. I don't know.

Shawn: 1:02:47

I really don't know. Is there any prominent Democrat or progressive that you have some faith in.

David Faris: 1:02:53

Yeah, of course there's a ton. I mean, I think that there are more good Democrats in Congress than bad. At this point, I think the number of people holding up legislative progress is relatively small. I think the number of Democrats who truly believe that the party should have gone in and rescued Henry Cuellar from his primary challenger in Texas last month, I don't think there's that many on the left. They're just in power right.

David Faris: 1:03:21

So there are older Democrats who I think have that fighting instinct. You know Bernie Sanders, elizabeth Warren, ed Markey in the Senate. There's Jayapal, who's just a great voice for the progressive left and the House of Representatives, the progressive caucus, I think, has the right spirit. I don't agree with every single thing that they recommend or do, but I think that they, more than anybody else, really get the big structural challenges facing the left in this country, when the Democratic Party right now is the vehicle into power for the left. And so I'm optimistic that the next generation of Democrats is more progressive, more aggressive, more recognizing of what the Republican Party has become and what we must do about it. It's just a matter of this. Demographic generational turn takes a really long time, especially when the older generation just will not clear the stage. They want to stay in power until they're no longer.

Shawn: 1:04:24

It's like the longest-lived generation yeah.

David Faris: 1:04:26

Seriously, man, I'm like don't you have grandkids? You want to go play with what the hell? I know what happened to retirement Right. Don't you want to garden or read some books? You really want to be making the fundraising phone calls when you're 84 years old? Maybe I'll feel differently when I'm 84, but I just don't get it. We've got to get rid of these people. It's like they've done their service. I think that they are out of step with the Democratic mainstream and what needs to be done, and they're really out of step with the nature of politics in Washington right now.

Shawn: 1:04:57

Okay, Last question what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately, and it doesn't have to be related to this topic?

David Faris: 1:05:05

Okay, sure, yeah, I mean it just in terms of can it be anything? It can be anything. Yeah, I just finished this. Okay, this is as a way of explanation. I don't have like limitless time to watch TV but I do have a treadmill in my basement that I put a tablet on and I run a lot. I get like five, six, seven hours a week to consume extra television above and beyond, I think, the normal person's consumption. I just finished this show on Hulu called Under the Banner of Heaven, which is about the origins of the Mormon faith and this murder scandal that happened in the early 80s in Utah. It's a really fantastically done show.

David Faris: 1:05:51

I appreciate especially sort of well done prestige television that opens a window into a subculture that I think a lot of Democrats and liberals and progressives are pretty much unfamiliar with. Like full stop, kind of like there was a show on Netflix a couple of years ago called Unorthodox that I've learned a lot. I don't take this stuff like uncritically at face value, but it's a good entry point into having a better understanding of how things work in these communities. It's from the lingo of the specialized terminology of Mormonism and the history of how this unfolded in the 19th century. It was a really fascinating look into, I think, a fairly significant political and religious subculture in the United States that would certainly benefit everyone to have a little bit more familiarity with, I think Democrats as a whole Sorry to bring this back to politics I enjoyed it as entertainment pure entertainment, too.

David Faris: 1:06:54

It's a really great, well done show with just terrific acting, but it also I was watching it thinking like man. The fact that we have just we have no idea what goes on in some of these subcultures is like one of the reasons that we have so much trouble messaging. It's just like we just don't. We don't know anything about millions of people. It's why evangelicals have to get up on Twitter and explain to us how things work in their community because we just don't know. I think that in the aggregate, that's kind of a problem. So, anyway, go watch this show. It's great.

Shawn: 1:07:23

I have actually I have it in my list and now this conversation is is maybe that will be the catalyst for me to like bump that up. Yeah, and you know what? You know, it jumps out at me. So I'm a runner as well and I but I don't have a treadmill. I run outside and what I find fascinating is people that run on treadmills primarily. Maybe they talk about running in in terms of time, and people that run outside it's always distance. So in my head I'm like seven hours. That seems like crazy to me. I run pretty often, but I don't think it comes to seven hours a week. But you've got me beat. Maybe I need a treadmill.

David Faris: 1:07:59

Well, some of this is blocking. I'm not going to lie to you. Some of this I like walk, run on the treadmill.

Shawn: 1:08:03

It's primarily walking.

David Faris: 1:08:04

Yeah, I'm getting old, so you know. So doing 40 miles a week is just not super realistic anymore, but it's a good way to pass the time, so I just cried.

Shawn: 1:08:16

So, dr Faris, thanks for the conversation. It was really thought provoking. I enjoyed it.

David Faris: 1:08:19

Thanks, Shawn. It was really great questions and I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope your listeners get a kick out of it.

Shawn: 1:08:34

Here's the deal. I think Dr Faris is right. Republicans have a strong electoral advantage in the American federal government and in the past decade or so, they've been single-mindedly committed to bending rules and smashing norms to ensure that not only do they continue to enjoy that advantage, but that they build a system in which Democrats can never hold federal office, even when and even though Democrats continue to garner more votes than Republicans. When this happens every once in a while, it's a quirk and we live with it. We did that in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote. But when it happens consistently and when one party in this case the Republican Party captures the system to codify this inequality, then it's, in Dr Faris's words, time to fight dirty or at least fight back. I don't want to sound alarmist, but I'm also tired of saying I don't want to sound alarmist just to have the worst happen. So I don't want to sound alarmist, but I am an alarmist.

Shawn: 1:09:32

2020 to 2022 may, in retrospect, have been the last good opportunity that Democrats had. I suppose still have to make some meaningful fixes to ensure a fair electoral process in the United States, to be a democracy. I do think that history will look back at people like Newt Gingrich, mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, as being overwhelmingly responsible for the decay of American democracy, at least in its last moments. And I agree with Dr Faris that they will also hold Senators Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema in low esteem as well. You have to ask when it comes to these two, what's the deal? I don't believe that they're so committed to collegial rules that they cannot, will not alter the filibuster to pass much needed legislation, and it's not just voting laws that Republicans, along with Senators Sinema and Manchin, are blocking, but also things like infrastructure investment and pandemic aid. I think there's also some ambition and some power inebriation at play here.

Shawn: 1:10:31

Neither Sinema nor Manchin are truly at the forefront of democratic politics. Sinema used the party to an electoral end. She was a liberal independent prior to running for the Senate, and Manchin has always been a conservative Democrat, but neither represents the direction that the Democratic Party is currently heading. And yet they're sucking all the oxygen out of the room and they're presiding over the party's demise. I don't think that Sinema has a natural home in the Republican Party, but I do think we should watch Manchin over the next couple of years If we end up with another split Senate after the November vote this year, manchin may begin to reconsider where his ideological home is, and if we go into the next presidential election in that situation, a 50-50 Senate and a Republican wins the presidency, I'd be willing to bet that Manchin switches parties. Circle back with me on that in a couple of years.

Shawn: 1:11:24

I'm really excited about next week's guest, dr Peter La Chapelle, a country music historian at Nevada State University and author of the book I'd Fight the World a political history of old time, hillbilly and country music. I'm in search of answering the question when did country music become so bloody conservative In the meantime? If you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to write me at deepdivewithshawn, at gmailcom, and you can find me on Twitter, at deepdiveshawn, and on Instagram at deepdivewithshawn. See you soon, folks.