Lilliana Mason

And really, I think it's a little bit of both.

And to back up, I will state my views very proudly that I think fall squarely in your camp, Miha, that I think a lot and agree with E.E. Schatzneider, the great political scientist, quote that, you know, modern democracy is unthinkable without political parties, that in order to have a healthy democracy, you need to have political parties that that have meaningful connections with people and are able to channel those people's preferences and demands of government into a governing agenda and then attempt to pass that governing agenda and see what the assessment of that is from voters.

And part of my diagnosis of what is wrong with American democracy is the weakness of our political parties.

And I'm very persuaded by the work of folks like Sam Rosenfeld and Danny Schlossman, who I know you've you've discussed before.

Yeah, I mean, just one to say thank you for that great distillation of sort of the relationship between some of these reforms and the reforms that I know you and the Center for Ballot Freedom are thinking about in terms of expanding party options.

Maybe one really strong place of overlap is this desire to create new civil society organizations that aren't stacked with political and social identities in the same way as our current political parties.

You know, the political scientist Liliana Mason has so convincingly shown how increasingly, you know, if you tell me one demographic or social fact about you, I can predict all of these other things that your identities are stacked on one another.

And to really get out of this polarized mess, we need to think about ways of creating more cross-cutting cleavages, whether that's through new parties that do not sort of fall on the standard left right spectrum.

But at least at the elite level, you have Republicans polarizing first and polarizing further.

How do we understand this? I think that the way that I would construe this is in harmony with the work of Liliana Mason, who is a wonderful political scientist, who argues that we ought to think about elite polarization as a reaction to a set of cultural, social, and economic changes that burst upon the United States in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.

The first of those changes is the dramatic influx of African-Americans into effective political voice, thanks to first the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and second, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The second change is the dramatic ethnic reorganization of the United States that follows a statute called the 1965 Hart-Celler Act.

And that's tied up into these divides over pluralism, but I think it's a distinct thing in its own right.

So

barring from Liliana Mason, whose paper I also recently read, it might be better to say that in American politics, the Republican Party in particular has radicalized against democracy, rejecting the premise of liberal society and constitutional government.

And we're watching this play out.

One thing that caught my ear in your comment was this idea of having a forum to debate ideas that are important to our time that aren't necessarily like immediate solutions.

It reminds me of an interview that I did recently on the show with a political scientist named Liliana Mason.

And she was talking about this concept of polarization, you know, where it kind of feels like people from the two major parties just don't like each other anymore.

And everyone's so angry now.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

On our latest episode, I spoke to political scientist Lilliana Mason about her recent article on the nature of polarization.

She explained that when the word polarization is thrown around, it's often by people who would like to see heated debates about American politics cool down, mostly to the detriment of minority groups and people who feel that their rights are under attack.

On PBS NewsHour last Sunday, Atlantic writer and former New York Times columnist David Brooks gave us a taste of what that looks like.

Mike Collins' office intervened at the Department of Justice on behalf of a Holocaust denier while his office was in cahoots with some of the nation's most notorious white supremacists.

Mike Collins is a bigot and it's disqualifying for a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

David Brooks' call for civility is the perfect setup for us to revisit a longer version of my conversation with Lilliana Mason.

Because when we edited it to fit the show, some good stuff was left on the cutting room floor.

And so another book that I absolutely adore, uh, called Uncivil Agreement, talks about these as cross-cutting cleavages.

And the researcher Liliana Mason talks about the ways in which our party system is kind of designed to smooth over those rough edges that conservative, church-going, gun-owning Democrats who, who own trucks is, is, is kind of [laughs] a dying breed and, and vice versa on the other side.

And I also like when I answer questions like this to distinguish between ideology, party, and campaign.

And there's a real inexact relationship there between true believers who are conservative or liberal or whatever they are, and then their, their party, and then the campaigns that activate them.

We belong to a community.

And when parties deliberately polarize the society to motivate their base, there is a great book by Liliana Mason, a political scientist.

She describes this as parties fuse cultural identities with the political identities and create this what she calls mega identities.

And now each mega identity sees other side as existential threat.

But that's deliberate.

There's a great book by Liliana Mason called Uncivil Agreement.

Don't know if you've read it.

I'm going

Uncivil Agreement.

I am always looking for more.

Liliana Mason.

Now, what she says is that political parties had fused cultural identities.