Is An American Parliament the Answer to Our Rotting Democracy?

Professor Max Stearns argues for a new system of government that would see the U.S. catch up with the rest of the world’s democratic systems.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Professor Maxwell L. Stearns, a well known, very well known constitutional lawyer. Practiced for quite a long time, has been a professor, now he’s at the University of Maryland, a professor of law, and he’s written a really fascinating book, and unfortunately, the title does not sound fascinating. It’s “Parliamentary America.” The subtitle kind of gets at it: “The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy.” And the content of the book is far more exciting, is very exciting, not just far more exciting than the title, because there’s a suggestion here that that this much vaunted presidential-oriented executive branch-dominated political system we’ve had, including the variations and limits on it of separation of powers, the division of power between the judiciary and the congressional and the president. Our much vaunted constitutional protections for individuals and so forth in the Bill of Rights. All of that is broken now, and, we do need a radical solution, and it means, really, fundamentally, through three constitutional amendments, which I’ll let him outline, can only be saved by a real radical reordering of American democracy. So why don’t I begin with… why don’t you lay out the main thesis here? And, we’ll take it from there. 

Max Stearns: First of all, thank you, for having me on your show. and, I will say the title is intended to convey something really central to the thesis of the book, which is that in order for us to emerge from the constitutional crisis we find ourselves in, we need to figure out a way to create a genuine, thriving multi-party democracy. And the thesis of the book is that the way to do that is to transform ourselves from a presidential system to a parliamentary system. And that’s really what the book is about, is to explain how we got to the crisis that we face and how to produce a thriving multi-party democracy. And to do that, we need to make some fundamental design changes along two democratic axes.

One involves the way that we elect the lower of our two legislative chambers, for us the House of Representatives. And the second has to do with how we select and hold accountable the head of government, the President of the United States. And I wrote this book because although in the period of time when I began to think about this, the mid-teens, people were beginning to see the crisis. Most of the proposals that were being advanced were not tackling the fundamental problem. And the central thesis of the book is that if you don’t get the pathology right, the course of treatment is destined to fail. And unless we confront the reality that it is our system of presidentialism that is causing us to have a two party system, the way it was set up, the way it runs, then we’re not going to be able to come up with a solution that provides what we truly need in order to be a thriving multi party democracy.

And this book offers what I describe as the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy. It doesn’t ditch the constitution and start over. It retains vital features of our constitutional system. We can talk about that, but in a surgical way, it allows us with three amendments to transform ourselves into a more legitimate, more participatory, more satisfying and happier multi-party Democracy. 

Scheer: Why don’t you lay out what these three amendments are. Basically, in your book you discuss models that exist, from Israel to Venezuela, you talk about Western Europe, you talk about… it’s interesting, you challenge in the book, very early on, that the basic American exceptionalism, celebration of American democracy, that we have the great system, that it works. And your point of view is that there are lots of other governments out there that have done a better job, or at least a score of governments, and that we really have to challenge this idea that we have the secret sauce. Was that a fair comment? 

Stearns: I think that’s precisely correct. I think that, we all went to school, those of us who grew up in the United States, in middle school and high school with a set of lessons about American exceptionalism, the idea that the framers, because they created the constitution that has been the longest lasting of any written constitution of a nation around the globe, that as you put it, it has the secret sauce or there’s something profoundly wise that other systems are lacking. But I confront my readers to ask themselves this question. If you were evaluating any system, whether we’re talking about an engineering system, a business model, even an art form. Would you say that the most successful example is a singular outlier replicated absolutely nowhere?

Or would you say that the best examples are the ones that have been benignly adapted again and again to satisfy different situations and different needs? And the reality is that although the United States has exported democracy around the world, it has never successfully exported our system of two party presidentialism. We have long been a recluse on the world stage because there are profound problems with two party presidentialism and systems that thrive and that do better, none of them are perfect, there is no perfect democracy, but systems that do better are characterized by proportional representation and largely by parliamentary selection of the head of government.

And so we need to ask ourselves what it is about our system that is causing a circumstance in which we’re looking at an election in 2024 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden almost inevitably at this point, despite the fact that about two thirds of American voters wish for more or better options. And despite the fact that the centers of the two dominant parties since the beginning of the information age, roughly the early 1990s have grown so far apart that each side regards those in the other camp as lacking basic intelligence or as evil. And the question then becomes, how is it that we have functioned with this system for so long, but that the centers of the two main parties, the only ones who have a shot at winning, are continuously growing further and further apart, so that we wind up with campaigns of denigration? And an incapacity to engage in the basic functions of governance.

Scheer: But they’re growing further and further apart in terms of their ambition for victory, who they think should run the country. but they haven’t really grown further apart in their view of really how the system should work. they’re both very good at exploiting the system as far as using money to gain. You have a phrase in your book where you say it’s not that the people choose the leadership that the leadership chooses the people by selecting constituencies and then controlling redistribution of districts, and so forth. And we see all that around this, but if we look at the program of the, even now Trump’s Republicans and let’s say it’s Biden Democrats, there’s far less difference on program than there would be in any other government that we know of that claims to be a democracy.

We don’t have people who actually advocate socialism or a pure market capitalism, or isolationism of a serious kind, tend to our own business or build an empire. That range you will find in Germany, France, elsewhere. These two parties do basically agree. What was the argument between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? She said, Donald Trump says he’s going to make America great again and Hillary Clinton had the effrontery, I think, to say, we’ve always been great. Well, that’s not true. It’s only true if you accept the view that whatever America does is great. We weren’t great when we had slavery or segregation. We weren’t great when we fought… . So let me throw that back at you. 

Stearns: So I’m going to somewhat push back against that. I’m not going to compare The divergence of our domestic politics with the divergence of domestic politics in other countries. To answer your question, I am going to say, if you look, for example, at the Pew research data from the early ’90s until the late teens, you actually can see fairly demonstrably. That the modes, or the centers of the two main parties, have grown and are growing increasingly far apart. And this is certainly true with respect to myriad domestic issues involving racial justice, involving women’s reproductive rights, involving what contributes to or doesn’t contribute to the legitimacy of elections.

Look at the events of January 6th, 2021, with respect to a host of issues involving the climate, involving covid. We can go on and on. But if we compare this, for example, to the fifties, we can look at the fifties and we can say that curiously, the American Political Science Association published a study in the early fifties in which the major critique of the two parties was that they’re insufficiently distinct. They didn’t offer voters a meaningful choice in the 1952 election. Both the Democratic and Republican parties went after the same nominee, Dwight David Eisenhower. Five years later, an economist named Anthony Downs wrote a book called The Economic Theory of Democracy, which kind of popularized this notion that we can cast our politics on a left-right divide and anticipate convergence toward the center.

We don’t see that, it doesn’t capture our politics because in fact, what’s happened with our politics is that the two parties, as they say, Since the information age have grown increasingly far apart. So I do think that there’s something real there. And in addition to their growing apart in particular issues of policy, I think it’s also clear that the Republican party under Donald Trump has pushed upward toward nationalist identity politics and culture, and there’s a tension on the other side, inevitably in response. I compare it to a seesaw or a teeter totter, depending upon the part of the country you’re from and what you name that particular playground ride, but as one side pushes up, inevitably, the other side is forced to push down when we only have two options available in our two party system, increasingly, what we perceive is voters who regard themselves as disenfranchised, not in the sense that they can’t literally cast a vote, but disenfranchised in the sense that they don’t believe that the candidates are representing the voters.

How they genuinely perceive the relevance of their ideological views, right? They regard themselves as not being meaningfully represented. Now, I do agree with something you said very importantly, which is as a result of hyper partisan gerrymandering, it is true that our representatives in the House of Representatives increasingly choose their voters, not the other way around. General elections in the House of Representatives are not competitive, but primary elections are competitive. The problem there is that primary and caucus cycle elections push the centers further and further apart. Because if you’re not adequately catering to the base of your party, you run the risk of being primaried by somebody who will? And that’s one of the contributing factors to this growing divergence, there’s another, but I certainly think that we are witnessing something real when voters regard themselves as being effectively disenfranchised by the very limited options that a two party system provides and this has become worse over time.

Scheer: Yeah. Let me just say, so we don’t have a false argument. I think, first of all, I want to recommend the book and that people read it. Because it’s obviously incredibly well informed and you know the law, the history, and it’s good to be introduced to the notion that maybe the thing that we all were raised to celebrate and to the degree that they still teach civics. I know through my own education, to this day, I parrot ideas about the separation of powers, and the checks and balances, and the restraints. And so forth, and there’s no doubt, that sort of has outgrown its celebration. It’s too easily manipulated and so forth, and you point to the internet and a lot of what has been done. So I don’t want to… the whole point is, I only do podcasts where I respect the book and the author. I just want to put that out there. I’m too old now to get in a food fight here. And I read the book and I recommend it to anyone. It’s real, it’s as good a civics introduction as you can read.

So let me just put that out there. And I think demystifying the American political system and pointing out that it isn’t the best thing out there. There are lots of people experimenting with other ways of doing this and just to summarize your main point, and you should explain what you mean by a parliamentary system because our listeners may not be getting it, but the idea that of encouraging multi party representation and then alliances have to be held. Most of us were raised to think that was terrible. The government in France fell, and so forth. That became a caricature almost. So why don’t we go to the real strength of your book, which is you are daring to challenge this presidential system. And the first point of challenge, as you just said, is that no one else seems to follow it.

Stearns: I think that’s right. And thank you for those kind words about the book. Let me explain one thing, which I think amplifies the comments that you just made, which is that, we all grew up understanding something about the way our constitutional system was designed to work, but it actually never really quite worked the way it was designed to work. So the way the framers set it up, they, or the way the framers believe they set it up, the way that James Madison believed he constructed the constitution, we were going to have a never ending set of rivalries among the three branches of government. Of course, that would be Congress, the presidency and the judiciary with a special emphasis on the Supreme Court. And we could think of this as a rock, paper, scissors constitution, right? Where every branch could defeat another branch or be defeated by another branch. And actually it can work in both directions because, because each branch actually can beat each other branch in a specific context and vice versa and so it could be scissors, paper, rock, and rock, paper, scissors, right? Because it moves in both directions and then  we add on top of that this notion of federalism. So we not only have rivalries associated with branches of government, we have rivalries at levels of government between the national government and the states.

And Madison thought, and the framers thought, this was gonna prevent what they were deeply concerned about, which is this notion of factions as precursors to parties. And they really thought that these games that they were constructing rock, paper, scissors, paper, rock. We’re going to prevent parties or factions from permanently embedding themselves into our system. But I will say it’s not just recently that has proved not to be the case. If you go back to George Washington’s farewell address, he made plain that it wasn’t the case. That partisan rivalries had embedded themselves even that early on. And in fact, what we ended up with early on as a result of the way the framers set our system up was an inevitable two party system. And so the difficulty there is it’s a very different game because the president is not just the head of a branch of government. The president is ahead of one of only two parties and members of Congress, whether we’re talking about the House or the Senate know that the leadership of that party is vital to their political success or failure. And as a result, what we’re seeing isn’t rivalries between and among the branches of government, but rivalries between and among or between two major parties, the only two parties that can conceivably gain power. And that’s a very different game from the ones that the framers put up with.

We put up with this alternative set of rivalries for a couple of hundred years, but in the information age, it became particularly problematic as a consequence, as we’ve just discussed, of hyper partisan gerrymandering, changing the nature of representation and also social media, changing the manner by which we get news and news-like information. And these combined dynamics have forced the centers of these parties or their modes further and further apart, basically rendering ourselves… we used to be able to think that people who read the same source materials as we did, might, in good faith, come out in a different place. We now think that people who disagree with us lack basic intelligence or are evil because we live in these silos of information and communication that have, as I said, pulled the centers of these parties further and further apart. And so what I motivate my readers to do is to open their eyes to the idea that other systems of democracy might do better than ours. We have to get past the notion of American exceptionalism. We have to be willing to learn from the experience of others, and we have to be willing to think it might be the case that other democracies do their jobs better than we do. And in the center of the book, chapters five and six, I take the readers. On a virtual world tour, chapter five to England, France, and Germany. Chapter six to Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela. Not because any of those systems are perfect. The whole point is that they’re not. But there are systems that do better than our system.

And the central lesson of that tour is that the real threat to democracy is extremism. Whether we’re talking about ideological extremism, or we’re talking about the number of parties. It turns out that the real threat to democracy is when you have too few parties like the U. S. and the U. K., you could think of Brexit. Or alternatively, when you have hyper fragmented parties, too many parties like you see in Brazil, like you see in Italy, like you see in Israel. What we have to figure out a way to do is to achieve the Goldilocks principle, we have to have more parties than two genuine competitions, but not so many that we have hyper fragmentation because the extremes provide a basis for a high valence or, strongly ideological candidate to come in and either take control of one of two major parties and then take control of the government. Or to get more votes than anybody else, more seats in the legislature than anybody else, and then roll over the other parties.So both of those systems, too few parties or too many, create that risk. And what we have to do is figure out how to achieve the Goldilocks principle. So what is parliamentary governance? The difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system. In a presidential system, we form our coalitions before the general election. That’s what primaries and caucuses are about. In a parliamentary system, based on the number of seats and proportionality, meaning each party gets a number of seats based on the number of votes they get, with different ways of doing it, we then have the party leaders negotiate a majority coalition when it’s done right, no party gets a majority. So in order to create a government, you have to be able to work well with other parties and the negotiation of the coalition takes place afterwards. The goal of democratic reform is to create a multi-party democracy without too many parties. The means of doing that is a particular kind of parliamentary democracy and I explained that and explained how we could make that ours in the book.

Okay. And I think this is a very, we’ll end this, but, I think, first of all, it’s great that you stated all that, because that’s the reason I recommend the book. I want to be clear about this. I have no doubt at all that a parliamentary system of the kind you described would give us a much better chance at having a meaningful democracy. That’s a no brainer, of course, and they have to stitch together coalitions. For instance, in Israel right now, and in Germany, the two countries that have a parliamentary system; France, you do get, generally, other voices. Sometimes they’re, like the Greens are part of the coalition in Germany. I used to go over there and interview some of the original leaders of the Greens. They must be turning in their graves at the idea that the Greens The Green Party is now a militaristic party that wants to suppress dissenting opinions.

I think people who believed in Israeli democracy would be shocked at Netanyahu’s dominance of it. And after all, this is a guy who’s now trying to destroy the limited checks and balances they have in Israel, destroy the court, and he was able to succeed with a parliamentary system and the old Labour Party barely exists. And so the coalition that he’s been able to stitch together, as was true, by the way, with the rise of Hitler, that Germany had a parliamentary system basically, and because people of power, and this is what I want to throw back at you as the last basic question, the people with real power in the society, went with Hitler. Everybody forgets that. The car makers, BMW or Mercedes also, went with Hitler. They allowed Hitler to dominate. Okay. And, in Israel right now, and Netanyahu, whatever you, where you think he’s going, he’s getting the support of the bigger powers, the people with money and so forth.

So it’s not itself a barrier to dictatorship and, so I think that’s something mentioned, but I do want to stress one last thing here, which I’d like you to address. We are divided over a whole bunch of questions that are important including global warming, and I don’t know really how much they differ, but it seems to me the real issue in global warming is, of course, to what degree will you restrain economic activity and so forth. For that, there doesn’t seem to be much sharp debate. Here, or in any of those other countries, the whole idea that you can’t hamper industrial development has been characteristic of all of these societies. But the critical thing, the two that I raise, I would like you to address as a constitutional scholar. Because they’re not minor, they’re, I think, what George Washington was saying. Finally, the two of us are doing something nobody ever does, which is look at his farewell address. They look at Eisenhower’s, which is pretty good, very good, in fact, on these same points. But it seems to me the real problem here is that this system, even as it is now, I shouldn’t say even, works for the people who have power. They get the tax breaks, they get to intervene all over the world, they get the military contracts, their profits, I mean Wall Street’s booming. Goldman Sachs, which ushered in financial deregulation, is doing very well, I see their profits go up every year, and so I want to throw it back at you, and again, I see it, accept that a parliamentary system would make that more difficult. 

I’m happy you wrote your book. I’m promoting it, not that will boost sales so much, but I certainly recommend that people, I want to be clear about that. I don’t think this is minor. I think it would be a much more vibrant, not much, but it would be a vibrant democracy. We really don’t have one. We a lot of the anger and the confusion and hysteria, but we are not really dealing in any vibrant way with our issues. And I just want to throw it back at you as a thoughtful, obviously brilliant, scholar of these things. It seems to me, that the thing that, undermined us continuously, after all, the reason we had slavery was because people of economic power wanted to have slaves do their plantation work, and, they insisted on it, and even after we got rid of slavery, they wanted a segregated society, and they were the people of power in the South, but also their allies elsewhere. The reason we are this empire building with something like 750 to 800 bases all over the world, we wage war continuously despite Washington’s concern, is that there’s profit in it and it works for a lot of people and they like the power and they go for the jingoism. So I just want to throw that back as my last question in terms of first of all, in terms of what undermines democracy throughout our whole experience is the pursuit of power. And when you go to war  so forth, it’s very difficult to challenge it. That’s the impostures of patriotism that Washington warned against. And then on domestic issues, the people who have the monopoly power are, with very rare exceptions, good at increasing it. Is that not the real big issue?

Stearns: There was a lot there. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don’t. And, we can’t go back and parse every aspect of what you’ve articulated. But let me try to frame this in a way that I think, Is responsive and hopefully helpful. Money will always play a significant role in politics. Well to do people will always have the resources with which to work political systems in their favor. There’s no question about that. There is no, there’s no sort of panacea that is going to make it so that moneyed interests don’t get an advantage as a consequence of being moneyed. That is a reality. There are two different ways the reformers look at the American project and its failings. Reformers tend to fall into two camps. There are divisions within each of those camps, but the two camps are those who believe the problem is parties, the anti-party camp. There are a number of proposals, the purpose of which seems to be To diminish or even eliminate the role that parties play.

I’ll put ranked choice voting, term limits, at large districting, these sorts of things in the kind of anti-party camp. I am not a member of the anti party camp. There’s also a pro party camp. The pro party camp recognizes that no matter what, parties will emerge in any democratic system. Because in fact, the only way really not to have parties is to have a dictator who declares illegal every party but hers or his. And that’s a reality across democratic systems. And when you recognize the inevitability of parties in a system, then you have to figure out how do you make it so that the parties as best they can in an imperfect world marked by all the things that we’re talking about, including money, are more likely to do the work for the citizens than simply for themselves and their leaders, including moneyed interests.

How do you achieve a result that makes it more likely that parties will more effectively represent the people and produce better policies? And the answer to that question is to fight hard for moderation, which is a very difficult lesson for people to hear. The difficult lesson is that ideological extremism and party extremism is the threat to democracy. You have to fight for the center. You have to fight for the Goldilocks principle. You have to figure out how to achieve an optimal number of parties, not too few, not too many. If you actually had meaningful competition across parties without hyper party fragmentation, it would be more difficult for money to manipulate the system. It would be easier, better, but not perfect for those who are committed to particular normative or ideological propositions, to achieve benefits in that system, because if you didn’t have a two party system, when you vote for a third party in the system that I propose, let’s say it’s the Green Party, and the Green Party says, look, we will join Democrats or Republicans, we’ll join your coalition, but the price of our joining your coalition is that you’re gonna have to give us policy concessions. You’re gonna have to give us an appointment in the cabinet. You’re gonna have to maybe even appoint the first opening on the Supreme Court. One of ours. You’re not gonna get all of that, but you’re gonna get something.

And the idea that is that unlike today, When you vote for a third party, what I call the third party dilemma, when you vote for a third party, who’s a spoiler, you’re throwing support to the party that you least favor, or what I call a randomizer, somebody who pulls votes from both sides and risks running into the outcome of the roll of the dice. In the system that I propose, when you support that third party, you get rewarded for doing so, because if that party plays its cards well, it’s going It can become part of the coalition, and it can deliver something of substance and meaning to you. Does this take money out of politics? Is it going to give you, Robert, everything you want, or me, Max, everything I want? Of course not. But is it going to motivate people to more actively engage in a legitimate set of democratic processes? Is it going to make the government more responsive? Is it going to be more satisfying? I’m absolutely convinced that it is, and my proof is, going back to where you and I began, when we look around the world at successful democracies, they do not look like ours. There are failing parliamentary systems, there are failing presidential systems, there are failing semi presidential systems. The most thriving democratic systems start with a baseline of parliamentary choice, but not all of them work successfully. Some of them have too many parties. Some of them too few.

So we have to achieve reform on two vital axes of democracy. How we elect the lower chamber and how we elect, select, and hold accountable the head of government. Once we do that, it doesn’t mean that you and I are going to each individually be happy. We don’t agree on everything. However, we will agree, I think, that the system that lets us press our views and move the government in a direction that we value will be significantly enhanced and improved. It’ll be more legitimate, it’ll be more responsive, and that’s the reason I wrote this book. Because we are in a crisis, and people need to have an understanding of how we got here and what we have to do to fix it. There’ll be lots of books to write afterwards. There’ll be lots of disagreements to be had afterwards. But they can be had in a system that’s genuinely functional, in which people feel that the system is legitimate, which is not the system that we have now.

Let me just offer the final example. If we had a parliamentary system, probably Bernie Sanders, who disagrees with the president Biden on what I think the two most, he’s come out very strongly now, finally, on foreign policy, as far as this blank check to Israel at a very intense moment. And he’s also obviously condemned Biden for being. Basically, even as a senator all along, a tool of financial interest that he represented in Delaware and that we’re failing the American public by not dealing with inequality. Were we in a parliamentary system, unquestionably, he’s not even officially a Democrat.

He’s an independent. Bernie Sanders would be leader of a, One party that was part of the democratic coalition that Biden is, who’s our president, is running, and they could withdraw and throw it back to the parliament, just as happens in any parliamentary system. And on the Trump side, there are strong Republicans who would be part of a coalition, but they would not be in Trump’s party and they would be able to threaten to pull out of his coalition and what your book is basically saying and it’s obviously a matter of common sense that a parliamentary system offers this alternative to I have to go with the lesser evil up to the point where the lesser evil is absolutely insane and is destroying everything. So yes, we’re in a locked in situation where most of us in this election will vote for a lesser evil you that we can barely tolerate and have to hold our nose and are afraid that maybe this person might even be worse than the alternative, a parliamentary system would prevent that nightmare and that would be part of a group and you could at least demand that your group pull out of it.

Is that a fair statement? 

Stearns: I’m not gonna address everything you’ve said, but I will, oh, wait a minute. 

Scheer: I wanna state it in a way that you can… 

Stearns: Let me finish. But, the parts about the parliamentary system, I do generally think that’s right. What I would say is this is the problem in a two party system. The problem in the system we have is, the reason it is a two party system is we have had single member districts since the 1840s for the House of Representatives. States, that’s the body that senators respond to, it’s like a single member district except it’s a state, and the presidency, set aside the Electoral College. When you have a system like that with one person representing a single district, each side realizes that the successful strategy is to divide the opposition and keep your side intact. And that gives rise to the two party system. What you are getting at, which I do agree with very much, is as a consequence of that, neither side is willing to give up any part of its constituency because you run the risk of throwing power to the other side in a properly functioning multi party parliamentary system.

You can reshuffle the coalition. And so you are willing to, and in fact, you may encourage America First to spin off from the GOP. You may encourage the progressives to spin off from the Democratic Party. There might be a Green Party. There might be a Libertarian Party. I believe that we naturally have about five to six parties beneath our two party system, and that means that we could shuffle the deck differently and not permanently. What the framers got wrong was thinking that the games were going to be among the branches of government and between the levels of government, but what they got right was the concern about permanent entrenchment of what they call factions and we call parties. They just didn’t create the mechanisms to prevent it. They created mechanisms that actually had the opposite result. And so the question becomes how to fix it. And I believe that my book is the best solution to fixing the problem of preventing the continued permanent entrenchment. of two parties. And on that, I think, and on that, I think you and I are in agreement. 

Scheer: And I agree with you. That’s the value, and it’s a huge value of this book because people don’t dare to think about that sort of alternative. And as you point out, it’s an alternative that virtually every other government in the world that defines itself as democratic or republic has chosen. I’ll end on that note. The book is called “Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing a Broken Democracy.” All of the other democracies in the world, I guess without exception, have a serious claim to democracy. I have done what this author has, and have followed a model that this author is advocating. So this, I would disagree that it’s even radical, the parliamentary system that I grew up in New York City, was never thought of as radical. Conservatives could win. There wasn’t, they didn’t burn down the place, they didn’t make a revolution, but they did allow people to represent their views, and to then, you use the cupcake analogy with kids at a party, which sticks in my head now. We don’t all have to have the same cupcake when we vote for it, we can have them represented and then people can withdraw and go back. I’m mangling your example, but no, 

Stearns: You’re, perfectly, fine with the example, but yeah. So the basic idea is that, the book begins with a little bit of an allegory sort of loosely based on a birthday party for one of my children, very loosely based, and the idea is, if you put a group of children to a vote on the flavor of a birthday party cake, And they’re split over multiple flavors. You might see some lobbying going on the other hand if they were allowed to choose the flavor of cupcakes, they could all be happy and that’s just a lead in to begin to thinking about two parties versus multiple parties. And how we can actually do better by way of our citizens and how correspondingly doing better actually produces more effective government. 

Scheer: Okay. And I want to thank you, professor for, Stearns for University of Maryland. I don’t know if I gave you a long title there, but I can’t remember. 

Stearns: That’s okay. I teach at the law school. I’ve been a law professor for many years, since 1992, but I’ve been at Maryland since 2005. Okay. 

Scheer: And you were at George Mason before? 

Stearns: I was at George Mason before that, and I’ve taught at some other places along the way.Scheer: And you’ve written other books, I should make it clear. And so you thank your deans and everything for the support they gave you. And I was actually quite touched by it, because it means that there’s a support for this way of thinking, which is encouraging. That these, this is not a far out, Hey, I could solve the problems of the world. This is something that kind of grows logically out of the concern that we have a broken system. I have to stop here or we’ll go on forever, but I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at the great NPR station, KCRW, in Santa Monica. We just celebrated not the founder, but the woman who had run that station who died, Ruth Seymour. I went to a service last weekend. There were a lot of people in the community, talking about how unique and how great the station is. I was actually moved by that. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who insisted I read this book. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, and Max Jones, the other Max, who does the production for video of these shows, and see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/12/is-an-american-parliament-the-answer-to-our-rotting-democracy/