Heather McGhee on Zero-Sum Politics, the Party System, and Finding Hope in History

Heather McGhee on Zero-Sum Politics, the Party System, and Finding Hope in History

Heather McGhee is featured on the latest episode of our This Old Democracy podcast. Heather is the former president of Demos, author of the bestselling The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564989/the-sum-of-us-by-heather-mcghee/], and one of the most incisive voices in American political life and thought. In the conversation with host Micah Sifry, McGhee connects the dots between the racial politics she chronicled in The Sum of Us and the authoritarian moment we're living through right now — and she doesn't let the two-party system off the hook. McGhee's central argument in her writing and organizing is that the "zero-sum mindset" — the belief that gains for people of color come only at the expense of white Americans — has been systematically deployed by elites to destroy support for shared public goods. She famously illustrated this with the story of Southern communities that literally drained and then shut down their public swimming pools rather than allow Black children to swim alongside white children. On the podcast, she updates that analysis for our era. For me it remains a useful and powerful framework for understanding what's going on in front of our dismayed eyes. "I wish that the book didn't have so much to say in this moment. I wish that it was an antiquated time capsule. If only... Elon Musk comes in, the richest man in the world and gleefully tries to destroy everything we hold in common from cancer research to national parks to life-saving AIDS treatment. We really are living in a world where the zero-sum story is the core right-wing narrative in the United States and in many other places." The conversation turns to why Trump's second term feels qualitatively different from his first. McGhee's diagnosis is clear: the corporate world has bent the knee, Silicon Valley has bankrolled the regime, and the authoritarian playbook — going after lawyers, universities, and media — is running on all cylinders. But she pushes back on the narrative that the country itself has swung sharply rightward. "I think it's really important that we not over-attribute an electoral snapshot to the heart and soul of this country… People are disgusted by the immigration crackdown… Donald Trump's numbers are in the tank across everything, from the economy to immigration. And people are actually more hungry for big solidarity solutions — like addressing health care costs in a way that is permanent, universal, and guaranteed. These policies that are like refilling the pool of public goods, they're a sort of update of the New Deal era, are far more popular than any political party." From there, the conversation moves to terrain that is very much The Ticket's home turf: whether the two-party system itself is one of the root causes of our crisis. McGhee doesn't hedge. "Between money-in-politics and the two-party system, we simply don't have enough choices, and there is such a radical class bias to our electoral options that you have a working class and increasingly a middle class that just does not have enough champions in politics. As long as that is the case — late-stage capitalism, record inequality, and we don't have a politics that is not responsive to it — we are going to continue to have volatility. We're going to continue to have faux populists, outsiders, authoritarians saying, 'I can fix this, I will blow up this system for you.' And then they come in and line their pockets." She's unambiguous about the remedy: fusion voting and multi-party democracy. And she grounds her case in history, pointing to the cross-racial Fusion coalitions of the post-Civil War South — in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia — as a model for what electoral pluralism can do for communities of color. "There is a long history in this country of fusion voting really being about creating cross-racial coalitions. And you see that in the era after the Civil War, when that is the only way you had white working class and Black power to help create Southern democracy, in that narrow window before the Supreme Court and the northern elites gave up on it." With the Supreme Court now amputating the last leg of the Voting Rights Act — wiping out majority-minority districts that have enabled the election of representatives from communities historically excluded from power — McGhee sees multi-partyism as a democratic lifeline. "[W]e need to massively disrupt our electoral system and give more people more choices. We do need to encourage politicians to seek coalitions. We do need to encourage movements to seek coalitions in order to get things done for the American people and solve our big problems and make sure we have nice things. "I do think that there is a way in which that does help create racial solidarity at the ballot box. And it's a very exciting dimension of the growing push for multiparty voting, for fusion, for more electoral diversity." The episode closes on a remarkable note. Asked how she maintains hope, McGhee — who is descended from enslaved people on both sides of her family — turns to history not as a source of despair but as a kind of ballast. "If you think about the generation of enslaved people that fought for their own freedom, that won … that saw emancipation, saw Black formerly enslaved people … legislating with grace and vision and power … and then saw a majority of the Supreme Court knock down the civil rights laws, saw the retreat from Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow and the adoption of Lost Cause ideology. That generation, it's unthinkable to imagine seeing all of that change and then that violent repression. And yet they didn't give up hope. They kept moving and building what would become the civil rights movement of the 20th century… [I]f that generation didn't give up hope in the face of that, then who are we to despair?" It's an essential conversation — and a reminder that the fight to refill the drained pool is also, inescapably, the fight for a pluralist, multiparty democracy.

Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next

In a wide-ranging conversation with Micah Sifry, longtime political columnist Kuttner takes stock of what went wrong, why the guardrails may be holding, and what it will actually take to rebuild democracy from what he sees as the wreckage of the neoliberal era. There's a particular kind of intellectual honesty in someone who has spent decades arguing for a position, been vindicated by history, and still asks himself: So why did we lose? That's the animating question of Bob Kuttner's new book, Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America [https://jpzengerbooks.com/2026/03/07/notes-for-next-time-surviving-tyranny-redeeming-america/], and it's the question that drives the latest episode of This Old Democracy. Kuttner — co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, professor at Brandeis University, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and author of 14 books — brings to this conversation the perspective of someone who has watched American politics from the inside and the outside for more than half a century. Host Micah Sifry gives him room to roam, and Kuttner takes full advantage. The through-line of Kuttner's memoir is captured in the title of one of its chapters: "Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics." As he tells Micah, he has long believed that the Democratic Party's embrace of neoliberal, market-first economics in the 1980s and 1990s was not just wrong on the merits — it was a political catastrophe. "The turn to neoliberalism basically set the stage for Trump because it meant that the Democrats gave up on the white working class, which made interracial coalition much more arduous. And the claims of neoliberalism that this would energize the economy turned out to be completely bogus. The only thing neoliberalism did was it made the rich richer and the middle class [and] the working class more vulnerable." When he and Paul Starr and Robert Reich launched The American Prospect in 1990, they were swimming hard against the tide. The conventional wisdom, personified by the rise of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, was that the Democratic Party was too pro-union, too pro-Black, just too liberal. The Prospect said: no, liberals need to become better New Dealers. Two years later, Bill Clinton was in the White House, quoting them — and then, largely ignoring them Kuttner knew better, in part because of his experience in midwifing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Kuttner was chief investigator for Senator William Proxmire's Banking Committee in the mid-1970s, and the story of how the CRA came to be is, well, thrilling (in a nerdy way). This profoundly useful piece of legislation did nothing more than consider poor people as legitimate actors in our society, deserving of respect when they too sought to obtain a mortgage and purchase a home. Kuttner describes how the CRA emerged: grassroots multiracial neighborhood coalitions, a sympathetic US Senator who did not accept any campaign contributions, investigative staff tasked with developing tough hearings, and a press that covered them seriously. The result was landmark legislation that created immensely powerful tools against redlining if the citizenry used them (which they did). Kuttner calls it his graduate education in how the financial system — and the political system — actually function. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the conversation, for listeners expecting gloom, is Kuttner's relatively buoyant short-term read on where things stand. "I think contrary to what a lot of people felt six months ago, I think the guardrails are holding more than we dared hope. Trump is just really on the skids. Republicans are giving themselves permission to criticize him. Democrats are feeling bolder and more feisty. He's lost the courts — which is just amazing." He notes that the recent defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — by a candidate who broke from the authoritarian's own party and organized a movement from scratch — is a meaningful data point: even entrenched authoritarians can lose when they lose the people. Unsurprisingly, he thinks it likely that control of Congress and then the presidency is likely to flip back once again to the opposition party. But then he pauses. Full stop. Because that's when he gets worried. Short-term optimism gives way to a much harder question. Kuttner frames it plainly: "I think democracy will survive. The question is whether it will deliver." For Kuttner, the social contract that his generation inherited — affordable college, decent wages for blue-collar workers, employer-provided pensions and health insurance, attainable home ownership — has been systematically dismantled. Restoring something like it will require a political agenda every bit as ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's. If Democrats return to power without that kind of courage and that kind of mandate, he warns, they will only incubate the next wave of authoritarian populism. The anxieties and resentments that produced Trump don't go away just because Trump loses. This is where Micah presses him on Lee Drutman's "two-party doom loop" argument — explored in the second episode [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-can-multi-party-democracy-reverse-the-two-party/id1826565158?i=1000718335362] of This Old Democracy – the idea that systemic electoral reform, not just better candidates, is what's needed to break the cycle. Kuttner's answer is characteristically grounded: he's skeptical that the constitutional structures of American politics will allow a full multiparty breakout, but he sees promise in operating within the two-party system while pulling it toward more progressive terrain. "I think the Working Families Party gives you the best of both worlds," he says — pointing to the well-known success of the WFP in New York but also the lesser known success of its model spreading to Philadelphia, to Massachusetts, and potentially to 20 or 25 states. That's not a revolution in the electoral system. But it might be how the system slowly gets more responsive, one coalition at a time. Micah closes, as he always does, by asking how his guest copes. Kuttner's answer draws on Ira Gershwin and Albert Camus, which is about as good a pairing as you're likely to find in a democracy podcast. "On the one hand, you fight like hell to try and take back your country. And on the other hand, you don't let them take away small pleasures. You know, having meals with friends or going to concerts or doing whatever you do that gives you joy. And the Ira Gershwin line is, 'No, no, they can't take that away from me.' "Camus wrote in the last line of the Myth of Sisyphus, 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' Sisyphus happy? He rolls the rock up the hill, it comes tumbling down. And my credo is Sisyphus happy — because sometimes the rock stays put for a long time, even though it ultimately comes tumbling down. "If you look at the Wagner Act, for 50 years, until Reagan started destroying it, two generations of blue-collar workers had a good life... And the rock always comes tumbling back down the hill. But in the meantime, you make meaning from endeavor." It's a beautiful formulation — and a useful one for anyone doing this work right now. Go listen to the full conversation. You'll come away with a richer sense of where we've been, how much of the current crisis was foreseeable (and foreseen), and what kinds of politics might actually be equal to the moment.

Voters are not Thinking like bankers. We're thinking like sports fans.

Political scientist Lilliana Mason on social sorting, partisan self-deception, and why the two-party system makes all of it worse. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features the remarkable Lilliana Mason, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, in a wide-ranging conversation with host Micah Sifry. Mason offers a rigorous — and at times unsettling — account of why Americans have stopped thinking of their political opponents as fellow citizens. She discusses parties, politics, policy, and young people. We really need to think about this one because the civil in civil society is an essential piece of the democratic puzzle. In Mason's view, political parties are essential to democratic decisionmaking. "[Parties] are a really useful informational shortcut for us. We can't ask our citizens to read every single piece of legislation and every piece of the party platform and know about all of the different parts of the platform and fully understand these policies. The reason we have representative democracy is because we don't all have time to do that and we can't expect everyone to do that. And so what parties do is they simplify that political decision that we are given the privilege of making as citizens. We can't all be experts. And so the parties give us a much simpler choice." Mason's work centers on a deceptively simple insight: we don't really choose our political parties the way we choose between competing products on a shelf. The "banker mind" model of democratic citizenship — the idea that voters coolly weigh policy options, calculate trade-offs, and select the candidate who best serves their interests — is, she argues, largely a myth. The reality is considerably messier. "Our punditry tends to assume that we think about politics sort of like bankers and we're choosing investments with a sober and quantitative mind and assessing the positives and negatives, you know, is this policy marginally affecting my family in this number of decimal points? But actually, that's not how we participate in politics. We're much more like sports fans when we engage in politics." What has happened over the past six decades, Mason explains, is a process she calls social sorting: the gradual alignment of partisan identity with race, religion, geography, and other social identities. In the 1950s, both parties contained meaningful internal diversity — cross-cutting coalitions that made it impossible to know, just from someone's party registration, very much about who they were. That era is over. Today, the parties have sorted themselves into two fairly coherent tribes, and the sorting makes genuine cross-partisan contact rarer with every passing election cycle. What makes social sorting especially durable, Mason says, is that people genuinely believe they are reasoning independently — even when they're not. She describes a political science experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned either a Democratic or Republican label to the same welfare policy. Democrats reliably preferred the "Democratic" policy, and Republicans the "Republican" one, even when the substantive details of the policies had been swapped. When asked afterward whether their party had influenced their preference: "Everyone said, not at all. That was entirely me. I have entirely come up with the reasons for my desire to have this policy enacted. We don't know that we're doing it. And also in that experiment, they said, do you think other people are influenced by their party? And everybody says, yes, definitely. Everyone else is influenced by their party, but I'm not." The distortions don't stop at policy preferences. Mason's research also documents systematic misperceptions of who actually belongs to each party. Americans consistently overestimate the share of Democrats who are Black, LGBTQ+, or non-Christian — and overestimate the share of Republicans who are elderly or evangelical. "Most people assume that Democrats are 35% LGBT and the true number is 5%. They assume that Democrats are 40% Black and the true number is 25%." These stereotypes aren't merely factual errors. They shape the emotional valence of partisan identity: if you believe the other party is almost entirely composed of groups you view negatively, your hostility toward that party will track your feelings about those groups — whether or not the factual premise is accurate. The stakes of all this, Mason makes clear, are not merely rhetorical. In her book, Radical American Partisanship, she and Nathan Kalmoe measure the kinds of attitudes that social scientists have found to precede mass violence in other contexts — dehumanization, vilification, openness to political aggression. The numbers they've compiled since 2017 are worth sitting with: "In 2017, it was about 40% of Democrats and Republicans who were willing to say the other party was evil. It's gone up to almost 70% of Republicans in 2022. Last summer, it's around 50 to 60% of Republicans and Democrats. In terms of dehumanizing the other side — we're up to 40% of Democrats and Republicans who are willing to say that people in the other party don't deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals." Mason is careful not to predict catastrophe, but she is equally careful not to minimize the data. The nightmare scenario, she says, is a tit-for-tat cycle: roughly 20% of Americans say violence to achieve political goals might be justified — but when asked what they'd do if the other side starts it, that number climbs to 40, 50, sometimes 60%. Sifry asked Mason about the degree to which the two-party system itself is accelerating these dynamics. Her answer was unambiguous: "The two-party system is a huge part of this. There's a psychological reason for that, which is that when you have a perception of a zero-sum competition, then the competition is more intense. Either we win or we lose. And the people who benefit from our loss are always the same people." Mason explained that In multi-party systems, by contrast, the lines of "us" and "them" are inherently more fluid. Parties that are adversaries in one election may be coalition partners in the next; voters have in their living memory experiences of that fluidity. Research comparing "affective polarization" — the raw emotional dislike of partisan outgroups — across democracies has found it to be less intense in systems where coalitional politics are the norm. The problem in the United States, Mason notes, is institutional: the two-party structure is deeply embedded in the rules of how we run elections. Dismantling it requires creativity — precisely the kind of creativity that efforts to revive fusion voting and open up the ballot are attempting. On the question of democratic restoration, Mason offers two distinct registers of hope. The first is structural and long-term: fixing the institutional incentives that make our current polarization rational from each party's perspective. The second is personal and immediate: recognizing that norms — unlike laws — are enforced socially rather than by state power. Which means ordinary citizens have more agency than they might think. "If we don't like the behavior that we're seeing from our political leadership, we ourselves enforce the social norms around politics. And if we feel like politics is getting too nasty and rude and uncivil, then one thing we can do is model good behavior, discourage bad behavior, and be the people that we wish our leaders were being." Asked how she personally copes with staring daily into the abyss of American partisan hostility, Mason offers a warmer note. She reads fiction before bed. She teaches college students. And she finds something genuinely encouraging in the generation that has never known a political moment before Trump: "This young generation — they don't remember a time before Trump. And they are pretty disgusted with the way they see the adults behaving right now. And they want a different kind of politics... They're creative, they're interested, they're paying a lot of attention, and they want something better." RECOMMENDED READING Liiliana Mason's books include: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo27527354.html] and Radical [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo163195227.html] American [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo163195227.html] Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo163195227.html] (with Nathan Kalmoe)

What does a democracy veteran and former Secretary of the State of Connecticut make of this moment — and what comes next?

A new episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport, who has four decades of democracy reform to draw on — and a lot of reasons to stay optimistic In a moment when the democratic project feels genuinely imperiled, it helps to hear from someone who has been in the fight for four decades and still wakes up ready for more. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport — community organizer, state legislator, Connecticut Secretary of the State, former president of Demos, former national director of Common Cause, and current executive director of 100% Democracy, an initiative he co-founded to promote universal voting. Over the course of an expansive conversation with host Micah Sifry, Rapoport traces an arc from the antiwar movement to the ballot box to the boardrooms of national advocacy, and explains why — despite everything — he remains an optimist. Rapoport pulls no punches about where we are: "There are zero guardrails on what Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the movement behind him would like to do to restrict and take over our democracy. So that's the worst of times." But he balances that assessment with a characteristic refusal to despair: "[A]s the song goes, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Because I do think that there are lots of ways in which people are working, as you are, Micah, to make democracy better. And I think that's a really important thing. I am an optimist on this question, because I think that the forces to preserve and improve democracy will ultimately prevail." Rapoport's path from Vietnam War protester to Connecticut state legislator was not a straight line, but it had an internal logic. After years of community organizing — working to empower people and make government more responsive — he watched the Reagan revolution demonstrate, with painful clarity, that electoral power could undo in months what organizing had won over years. The answer, for him and for many in the community organizing world at that moment, was to enter the arena directly. He ran for the Connecticut state legislature in 1984, won, and was assigned almost immediately to the elections committee — which he would eventually chair. Ten years of immersion in election law and voting rights policy followed. "It's not a super straight line, but there is definitely a through line... the idea that there is tremendous inequality economically and socially and racially in the country, and at the same time, our democratic institutions are failing to deal with it." Rapoport's run for Secretary of the State in 1994 offers one of the most compelling real-world demonstrations of what fusion voting actually does. Rapoport, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by A Connecticut Party, the independent, centrist party that ex-Republican Lowell Weicker had created in 1990. When the votes were counted, Rapoport had received 365,000 votes on the Democratic line — and 125,000 more on the "A Connecticut Party" line. He won the race by 2,237 votes. "Absent A Connecticut party, no way I would ever have been elected." That experience didn't just help him win. It shaped how he governed. One out of every four of his voters had come to him on a third-party line — moderate, old-line Republicans who crossed over based on shared values around the income tax fight and civic reform. He knew who they were and felt accountable to them. "I definitely was more bipartisan than I might have been — more conscious of making sure that the people who voted for me on the Connecticut Party line felt good about it." To critics who argue that fusion is too complicated for voters or too difficult to administer, Rapoport has a direct response: "It's not only not rocket science, it's not even algebra. It's just third grade math. You can vote for a candidate on one line and on another line, and at the end of the night you add the two votes together to get a total." He adds, with characteristic directness: "I'm urging any secretary of state who's thinking about it to give me a call. I can give you a hands-on lesson. It's easy." As Secretary of the State, Rapoport oversaw elections in a state where fusion had been practiced continuously and understood the nuts and bolts of running it well. He and Micah also discuss what was achieved beyond fusion: implementing the National Voter Registration Act ("Motor Voter") aggressively and thoughtfully; expanding access to the primary system; and thinking of the office itself as, in Rapoport's phrase, the "advocate in chief for democracy and participation." After leaving office, Rapoport continued pushing the frontier. At Demos, which he led for 13 years, he helped drive the national expansion of election day voter registration — from six states when he started to 25 today. The goal was always the same: close the gap between who is eligible to participate and who actually does. But at some point, that incremental approach confronted its own limits. Rapoport describes the moment of clarity: "I had been working for all the democracy reforms — same-day registration, early voting, mail-in voting, restoration of voting rights — and all of those moved the needle of expanding voter participation, but not very much. I said, is there anything that could really move the needle?" The answer came from an unexpected quarter: a paper by E.J. Dionne and William Galston [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-case-for-universal-voting-why-making-voting-a-duty-would-enhance-our-elections-and-improve-our-government/] for the Brookings Institution, which made the case for treating voting as a required civic duty. Rapoport learned, to his admitted embarrassment, that 25 countries already have mandatory voting — and that Australia has had it since 1924, achieving 90% turnout in every election since. "I said, wow, this is something that needs to be discussed in the United States." The result was a book co-authored with Dionne [https://thenewpress.org/books/100-democracy/] and the creation of 100% Democracy [https://100percentdemocracy.org/], which advocates for what Rapoport calls "universal voting" — mandatory participation, but without mandating a vote for any particular candidate (you can leave a ballot blank or mark "none of the above"). And crucially, this doesn't require federal legislation or a constitutional amendment. States set the time, manner, and place of elections. They can do this themselves. Bills are currently moving in Connecticut and Illinois. Rapoport has continued to build relationships with elections officials around the country, attending the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference and speaking with counterparts from both parties. He finds real openness — both to fusion and to universal voting: "I spent some time in Washington at the [NASS] conference and had great conversations with Secretaries of State, both Democrats and Republicans." That cross-partisan dialogue matters. Rapoport's own career is proof that fusion works best when it transcends party lines — and that the voters who use third-party lines are often precisely the voters politicians need to understand and speak to. At the end of the episode, Micah asks the question he poses to all his guests: how do you cope? How do you keep your head up? Civic faith, says Rapoport. "What gives me hope and keeps me going is the sense that there really are — and I believe a majority of people in this country who want to participate, who care about making our country a better place, who are willing to push back. I mean, you look at the incredible civic pride that has come over Minneapolis since the ICE raids. I just think there's a lot of ⁓ really, really good things happening. If I can be part of that and maybe even bring some new ideas to it, that's a good reason to get up in the morning."

How Natural Is the Two-Party System? (Spoiler Alert: Not at All)

The latest This Old Democracy podcast features political scientist Lisa Disch on the artificial roots of two-party rule, the buried history of multi-party democracy in the US and a credible strategy for creating a better party system. If you've ever felt trapped by a disagreeable, binary choice at the ballot box — known in elite political science circles as the "hold your nose" vote — Lisa Disch wants you to know that feeling isn't a personal failing. It's a structural condition, and not a natural one. It didn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to stay this way. Disch, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-tyranny-of-the-two-party-system/9780231504676/], joins host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy for a wide-ranging conversation about the rules, myths, and suppressed history behind America's duopoly. The result is an illuminating conversation — essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what's broken about our politics, but how it got this way, and what we can do about it. Disch opens with a provocation: she would ban the very phrase "two-party system" if she could. Not because two parties don't dominate American politics — they obviously do — but because calling it a "system" implies something organic, inevitable, and permanent. It's none of those things. "Most people in the US accept third party failure as a matter of course. They feel that third party candidacies put them in a terrible position — in the grips of a terrible dilemma. Do I vote for a candidate who might represent me better, but may end up throwing the election to the candidate whom I, and actually most people, least prefer? And we assume that this is just a natural feature of the two-party system. And we don't think about the institutions that make this game so stacked against third political parties." That's not a description of nature. It's a description of rules — rules that were deliberately designed, largely at the turn of the 20th century, to choke off the extraordinary multi-party vitality that had characterized American democracy for most of the 1800s. The history Disch tells is one familiar to regular readers of this Substack [https://centerforballotfreedom.substack.com/p/once-upon-a-time-in-america], but unfamiliar to most Americans. Before the adoption of the government-printed "Australian ballot" in the 1890s, parties printed their own ballots, and fusion candidacies — where a single candidate could and did appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — were common and powerful. They allowed third parties to build real coalitions, elect real officeholders, and sustain real organizations. Then came a two-step trap. First, states adopted ballot access thresholds that made it costly and difficult for minor parties to qualify. Then — and this is the critical piece — some states quietly banned fusion by requiring that no candidate could be nominated by more than one party. The effect was devastating: "What this meant was that partisans of one party would not vote for the candidate that looked like it was the candidate of the other party... populist voters [would say], 'I'm not voting for the Democratic party. They're a terrible party. They supported slavery. Why would I do that? I'm going to lose votes.'" A populist organizer of the era saw it coming with brutal clarity, as Disch quotes: "Whenever a fusion candidate running under the Democratic heading alone produced many stay-at-home votes – that is to say abstainers – in the future, we populists will have to get on the ballot by petition." They understood exactly how the new rules would hollow out their organizations. And they were right. "This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for third political parties to have any lasting presence in US elections — because you spend an enormous amount of resources just getting on the ballot." The near-destruction of fusion voting didn't just limit ballot options. It destroyed something more fundamental: the capacity of ordinary people to build durable political organizations that could teach civic skills, develop political identities, and force new issues onto the national agenda. "Party organizations are incredibly useful because they teach voters civic skills and give them a commitment to participation that does not revolve around a charismatic person." This is why, Disch argues, 20th-century third-party efforts so often collapsed into personality vehicles — Perot, Nader, Stein — rather than sustained movements. Without the rules that enable organization-building, third parties become flashes in the pan. And flash-in-the-pan politics, as Micah Sifry noted in his own earlier writing (which Disch quotes back to him), leaves us with "chronic explosions of anti-incumbent sentiment and independent celebrity bids for office as the only alternatives to the duopoly." So far this is familiar stuff to most readers. But then Disch explains the deeper damage, far beyond electoral mechanics, that is all-too-familiar to American voters and organizers. "The two-party system we have today is giving us what political scientists like to call one-dimensional conflict. And that describes a conflict in which it can only be zero-sum because if you win, I lose, and in which I see you in very narrow terms. I assume that we disagree on everything. So all my beliefs fall in one line and all of your beliefs fall in one line." A multi-party system, by contrast, offers a more nuanced picture of political reality — one where people's beliefs don't have to be sorted into two pre-packaged bundles, and where coalitions can form around specific issues rather than tribal identities. One of the most striking moments in the podcast conversation comes when Sifry asks what happens when readers and students first encounter "buried history" — in this case, when they learn that the Constitution says nothing about political parties at all: that for most of the 19th century formidable third parties succeeded one another with what historian John Davis, in 1933, called "bewildering rapidity:" [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1902325] and that the United States is the only democracy in the world in which a major new party did not emerge in the entire 20th century. Buried history, says Disch, produces first surprise — and then a sense of possibility. "They think that the two-party system has always been what it is now. And anytime you realize that something wasn't always what it is now, and that what it is was the product of decisions that people made, then you know that, well, those could be changed." Perhaps the most inspiring part of the conversation is Disch's account of the abolitionist third parties of the mid-19th century — the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers, and eventually the Republicans. These weren't just moral crusaders; they were sophisticated political strategists who understood that you can't change what people fight about without first building the organizations to fight differently. "For slavery to become a political fight, the abolitionist parties had to make it so — because both the Whigs and the Democrats were economically and politically rooted in the institution of enslavement in the same way that both of our political parties today are rooted in the economy of fossil fuel." The Liberty Party made a deliberate choice: it would be a political abolitionist party, not just a moral one. That meant building a coalition not of people who all agreed on the deep moral wrongness of slavery, but of people who could agree that enslavement was an attack on democracy itself — and that it threatened the freedom of white citizens alongside enslaved ones. It was a big-tent strategy in the service of a radical goal. "They not only built a coalition with people that they didn't fully agree with... It wasn't 'you're either in or you're out.' It was 'I bet we've got an argument for you that might bring you in.' And then they shifted the line — or they drew a line of conflict that didn't exist before." What made all of this possible - all of it - was fusion voting, which allowed these emerging parties to ally with sympathetic politicians from within the major parties as they grew. Without that flexibility, none of it could have happened. At the close of the conversation, Sifry asked the question he puts to every guest: in the face of what feels like the gravest threat to American democracy in living memory, what gives you hope? Disch draws from two wells. One is her students at the University of Michigan, whose engagement and seriousness move her. The other is her work as an Ann Arbor City Council member, where she's seen residents vote to tax themselves to fund affordable housing and carbon-free infrastructure — doing, as she puts it, "the boring, dirty, hard, slow work." That combination — engaged young people and vibrant local democracy — is, Disch suggests, where the seeds of a different kind of politics might take root. Maybe, someday, with better rules, those seeds could grow into something more.