D (10:49)

A story of ideas and power in our time. And the name of my podcast is the Good Fight that's Got that I'm going to get in we love.

B (10:56)

We love the good fight. We love the good fight. And here is Colin Cole, and he doesn't qualify for the show unless he has a podcast, too. He is, in fact, the host of the Future of Our Former Democracy and, and is the director of policy, outreach and communications at More Equitable Democracy. Tell me a little bit about that org, Colin.

C (11:16)

Yeah, well, we're on, we're on some ban lists now because we have the word equity in our name, but we're a racial justice organization and we focus on electoral systems reform as a means to help achieve racial justice and pass policies that will better reflect the full diversity of our nation.

B (11:37)

Yeah, And I also like the reasonableness of the ambition. More equitable, right? Not the most equitable. Not even truly. Just more equitable. It's a nice place to go.

C (11:46)

Yeah, we don't need, we don't need 100% equity.

B (11:49)

So, as I indicated there up top, the United States has sent Iran a 15 point plan to end the war in that country. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is to say the power structure of Iran is pushing back. They have added a list of their own demands, which include you ready? The closure of all American bases in the Gulf, reparations for attacks on their country, allowing Iran to collect fees from tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, and the permission to keep its missile program with no negotiations to limit it. Okay, the phrase nonstarter comes to mind. But I do want to ask you, Yasha, you are a political scientist and you have done some study on negotiations, and what are the circumstances that negotiations usually find fertile? Does the situation here seem at all like a classic conflict that could be or is apt to be negotiated?

D (12:52)

So I've negotiated one or two things in my life, but I don't think I've done any studies in negotiation. I'm certainly not an expert in negotiation. But I think the first thing that's just striking is that I think Trump is a kind of playbook on his foreign policy for the first five years that he's in power, the first term and the first year of the second term, which was do a few spectacular actions, people wake up, the action is already over. He can declare victory and then move on. And that was very shrewd. I don't think it always served strategic objectives very well, but it was very shrewd because it allowed him to show strength, to use the overwhelming might of the American military without getting bogged into wars that can turn very unpopular. And I think that he hoped that this conflict with Iran would be somewhat analogous. I think he knew that it would take somewhat longer. But the beginning of it was similar. You wake up, the Ayatollah has been killed, and two or three days later the regime collapses and we have democracy in Iran and great victory. Of course, that's not how it played out. The military objectives of the United States are going relatively well. The political objectives are going very poorly, in part because Iran has closed down the Strait of Hormuz with huge downstream effects on energy costs and everything else. And the core question to me now is, and it's a question that I have difficulty answering and the people I've talked to have difficulty answering, is the end of his war still a decision for Donald Trump to take? If Donald Trump decides tomorrow the war is over, we've accomplished some objectives, we haven't accomplished other objectives. Is that the end of a conflict? Or does Iran continue to fire very damaging weapons at Israel, but also at Saudi Arabia, at other Gulf allies of the United States? Is it going to continue to be able to close down the Gulf of Hormuz? And if all of that is the case, then in some key respect, America, and especially America's allies, they're going to be worse off at the end of this war than they were at the beginning of this war. So that also would be a non starter. And so that's why you now see this kind of attempted negotiation, as you're pointing out. I think the political positions and the worldviews of the two sides are so far apart that it's hard to see them striking a grand bargain. Perhaps they can come to some kind of ceasefire agreement that effectively restores some elements of a strait Scorpion from before the war, but it's not clear that that's going to happen.

B (15:19)

Yeah. So, Colin, I don't know you that well, but I know some of your biography and you've worked for electoral reform in America. You worked for Bernie Sanders or campaigned

C (15:31)

for him on the campaign? I worked, yeah.

B (15:32)

Right. So I'm going to assume you have the Bernie Sanders view of the world, which doesn't, or the view of these wars, which doesn't greatly contradict, I would say, America's view in total. But. But I'll ask you this to pick up on what Yash was saying, that shrewdly, he used the word shrewdly, some of his past military endeavors have yielded some fruit. Maduro maybe killing Al Baghdadi. And so maybe you could say, maybe you would just totally reject the premise, but maybe you could say, yeah, given his worldview, I see how he could think that those made sense. So I'm going to allow you to either comment on that or not. But where I want to take it is can you see, can you begin to see how he would think that this would work out, knowing what you know about Donald Trump?

C (16:19)

Yeah. Well, before I answer, I want to give a quick caveat that I am definitely not a policy expert in Iran and foreign relations. At some point, bring an Iranian person on the podcast. I'd love to hear what they have to say about it.

B (16:36)

That, that aside, someone a citizen of Iran.

C (16:40)

A citizen of Iran, or you think

B (16:42)

without the Internet, they'd have more insight than you who've been watching this some.

C (16:47)

It could be an Iranian citizen who lives in the United States or a descendant of Iranian.

B (16:54)

Okay, I have you. And so I'm asking.

C (16:57)

That's right. So that that caveat established. You know, I think, frankly, the crux of the challenge here is that I think the United States and Israel have two. At least Donald Trump and Israel have two different goals for the war in Iran. I think maybe President Trump went in thinking it was just going to be like the Maduro situation and the goal effectively was regime change. Pete Hegseth said it's not a regime change war, but the regime sure did change. But when you see that Israel went on to kill opposition leaders, folks who were on house arrest, who were resisting the ayatollah, politically, it seems like the goal of Israel is not so much to just change the regime of Iran, but really to bring a failed stake into being, to collapse Iran and so that its government is untenable. And if Israel and the United States are pursuing these two pretty diametrically opposed goals, it's hard to see how to square that circle. Even if the United States wants to end the war and get out and stabilize Iran, if Israel doesn't want Iran to be stable and they're going to continue their own military action, or like Yasha said, if Iran will not just accept the end to hostilities, it's hard to imagine there being good faith negotiation between these three parties.

B (18:26)

Yeah. And so if there is a divergence between what the United States goal and what Israel's goal was, I could at least articulate what Israel's goal is. I think you made an attempt at that. Is the United States goal actually articulable in your opinion?

C (18:42)

I don't think that it is articulable. And that's mostly due to the fact that depending on which U.S. diplomat or leader you're talking to, they give different Answers. We've heard that it's for regime change, that it's not for regime change, that it's to promote democracy in the Middle east, that it's for oil, that it's to bring oil prices down, that it's to control oil, that it's to help Israel, that it's not at all for Israel. And it's a situation where it's not just the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. But really the entire administration does not seem to be on the same page about why the US Got involved militarily in the first place.

B (19:14)

Yeah, that is true. The Trump administration has a habit of saying everything and its opposite, as does Donald Trump himself. It's going to be over. No, we're going to stay for as long as we can. And this isn't good. This certainly gets in the way. But on the show, I have, I guess, steel man, the case where I say, yes, it is true that Donald Trump has often been inaccurate in his descriptions of obliterating the nuclear facilities in Iran and of how well this is going. He always engages in puffery. If you even allow for that, to cry it, but allow for that. Yasha, do we actually understand, do you think you have more of insight into what he's really thinking here and then how that relates to where we are today? Another way to ask that question is, do you think Trump himself is surprised as to where we are today?

D (20:05)

I try not to get too far into the mind of Donald J. Trump, so I don't know that I know exactly what he's thinking. You know, it does seem to me like the administration has totally failed to articulate a clear case for what it's doing. And I do think that comes downstream from a deeper incoherence where they don't have very clear strategic goals in this war. And so they did not anticipate key choke points like the Strait of Hormuz becoming a problem. And so I'm not sure that they know exactly how to get out of the thing that they started. I think that's different from saying that there aren't some coherent objectives of the United States could have pursued, one of which is obviously transmantle Iran's nuclear program, which is very threatening to the whole of the Middle East. Another is to make it impossible for Iran to be the premier sponsor of terrorism in the Middle east and beyond which it has been for a very long time, to the chagrin of many of its neighboring countries. And the third of which is to help the Democratic aspiration of the Iranian people. And there is opposition in Iran. It's for people who took to the streets In January, about 30,000 of whom were murdered by their own regime. I don't know, Colin, whether you're referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an opposition leader who you had in mind with the earlier comment. But if Ahmadinejad is who you had in mind, I think calling him an opposition leader is a significant misinterpretation of who he is in the role that he has played. So there is a theocratic, extremely right wing in every way that matters, regime in Iran, but has some internal tensions and some internal intrigues where people can fall into favor or fall out of favor in the way that sometimes senior generals in the People's army in Beijing will suddenly find themselves under house arrest. But to allow that to be counted as an opposition leader alongside the brave people who actually are fighting for democracy in Iran and who were murdered by that regime, I think would, would be a misinterpretation of what is happening.

B (22:20)

Yeah, I was. That raised a question to me, too. And one of the problems is there's no identifiable opposition within the country. So this whole hope of the people will rise up okay, not during an active bombing campaign, but also who, how, with what arms, under whose instruction? Rallying around who? I understand the Shah's son is waiting in suburban D.C. where he was born or somewhere in the UK to go in. I don't think even Donald Trump has said he's not the guy to be the opposition. But that is another major aspect of this that really confuses me where they say, sure, we'd love a regime change, and yes, the people rising up and claiming power for themselves is a great outcome, but they haven't done anything to even convince someone who wants this to happen that it's at all possible. But, Colin, go ahead. Who are you talking about with the opposition leaders?

C (23:18)

There was now, I guess there are allegations, hasn't been confirmed, but that there were in late February, early March, an attempted assassination of Mir Hussein Mousavi, who was one of the organizers and leaders of the Green Revolution in Iran in the late 2000s, who has been under house arrest since 2011. So to the extent that there's, you know, he's not formally an opposition leader, like there is not an opposition party that he is part of, but he was one of the preeminent leaders of a big opposition movement 20 years ago. And so potentially, you know, could be seen as someone like an Alexander Navalny, someone who could be a standard bearer for A new, more democratic Iran who was also targeted allegedly in. In strikes alongside other folks along the chain of succession.

B (24:13)

Okay, so what do you think of this idea of wanting there to be an uprising, doing nothing about it? Parallels to Cuba where the same thing is said. But I don't know who this is. This is the problem. You want an opposition in the most repressive regimes, but the most repressive regimes, by definition, don't allow for opposition. So what do you do? What do you think we should be doing? What's the most moral thing to do? Colin?

C (24:40)

So, you know, I'll go ahead and represent Bernie Sanders. Like. Like, yes, in general, I think intervention militarily overseas has been a disaster. The United States has a terrible track record when it comes to our success. We have toppled more democracies than we have built, and we just don't really have the staying power to see things through. We also typically go in with strong military might. But like you've mentioned, we do not end up putting in the economic power, the diplomatic power, or the energy that really is required to build a democracy. This might come up in a little bit, but, you know, after World War II, with the Marshall Plan, the United States and Britain and France, we poured so much money into West Germany to help them rebuild their economy. If you look to most of the nations we've invaded, like Iraq or most of Central and South America, if you go back last 70 years, that economic investment is not there. We topple the regime, we say there's going to be democracy, and then we usually don't see it through. The other big challenge, I think, is that there's not really a bright line for when we decide that it's a good idea or when it's not. If we want to promote this idea of top ruling dictatorships and supporting democracy and supporting the people, there are so many dictatorships around the world. Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea. Why aren't we going into these countries? Where do we draw the line? And especially when you look at what's been happening with the oil futures and the opportunistic timing of trading hundreds of millions of dollars on oil futures literally 10 minutes before or 1 minute before, in the case a few days ago, before massive foreign policy decisions are made about oil. I think that does beg the question about whether or not the tail is wagging the dog here. And to what extent is all of the moral justification in Iran really window dressing on what is either an economic decision or a decision at the behest of our allies?

B (26:47)

Yeah, the futures market did see a big spike before Trump's post. And I don't put it past Trump at all. In fact, you can even make the case that maybe there is a wisdom to try to use your bully pulpit to calm the markets or get prices lower for your own political project and also, you know, to help the American people. But what Colin just said, Yasha, this is what flummoxes me. Understand for the most part, Trump's theory of the case. I'm not asking you to get in his head, but his theory of the case is if we own the libs and make Matt Maga happy, we'll be okay. But he has to know the vast majority of Americans, of young Americans, of people who'd be voting more or less agree with Colin that our foreign interventionism has not gone well. And he also has to know that a pretty large percentage of his own coalition definitely think that. So I would think the way to contradict that is to have successes. When you take out Maduro, he could say, well, you could clamor all you want about foreign intervention. I'm sure Bernie Sanders will. But that went well according to my definition. When it doesn't go well, when the rubber meets the road of failure, how does he think it's going to help him? And I get back to, I know we all insult Donald Trump's habits of mind, but you use the word shrewd. I don't know that he makes this kind of miscalculation and mistake with an issue that many members of his own base are very uncomfortable with. Can you think of other parallels? Can you give me an analysis of why he thought that this would go so well, or did he really just not believe the briefers who said the straight of Hormuz was going to be closed?

D (28:30)

Well, I think a lot of the briefers didn't say that, actually. Clearly, the administration really underestimated the risk of a strait of Hormuz being closed. And this is what makes it so hard to now sort of call the war day and say, we're moving on. Right. So I think what happened here is that Trump was empowered by what, in purely political terms were quite shrewd moves, which is to have a series of military actions that are very brief, that don't involve a lot of American expense, that don't risk the lives of a lot of American soldiers. They're over nearly as quickly as they started. You get to play macho and play the guy who's imposing his will on the world and move on to the next subject. And I think it's that series of relative successes, the bombing of Iran last June, the capture of Nicolas Maduro in January, that then allowed Trump to think, and now we're going to do the same with Iran, and if we've captured Maduro, why not kill the ayatollah? And everything is going to be great. And I didn't think he reckoned with the fact that Iran would then turn around and attack various Gulf states to the extent that it did. They obviously expected Iran to attack Israel. They didn't expect Iran to attack Saudi Arabia and other places in the Gulf. They didn't expect Iran to close down the Gulf of Hormuz and the Strait of Hormuz. And that's why now Trump suddenly realizes we're in this longer, protracted conflict, we don't have an easy way out. And that obviously is unpopular with his own base. It is striking that in the year 2000, it was actually George W. Bush that was seen as being more isolationist on foreign policy than his rival, his main rival for the Republican nomination at the time, John McCain. It was Barack Obama in 2008 who was much less in favor of American entanglements abroad than his main rival in the nomination, Hillary Clinton. And, of course, it was Donald Trump in 2016 who distinguished himself from his other Republican candidates in those primaries in part by saying, I'm not going to go in for this foreign military adventurism. And so you do need to understand the kind of growing frustration of American voters who say, no matter who we vote for, no matter how much they promise that they're going to allow us to get disentangled from the world, we'll wake up and boom, we're in another one of these wars. And I fully understand and share the frustration. I do just want to say, though, I don't think it's accurate to say there is no opposition in Iran. I think it is clear from the very brave protests in December and January that there's a huge number of Iranians

B (31:10)

who are deeply organized, identifiable leaders. Opposition.

D (31:15)

Yeah, no, no, I know that's what you meant, but I think it's just important to say it explicitly. You know, Venezuela is an extremely repressive regime, but they have kept up pro forma elections, which allow for the emergence of an organized opposition led by people like Machado, whose political forces won the election that was then stolen from them last year, or perhaps it was the year before at this point. So that then allows you to have a organized opposition with some amount of democratic legitimacy. In Iran, there have been no free elections since 1979, the sham elections to which only theocrats are allowed to present themselves. And so that has made it very difficult for the huge number of Iranians inside the country and outside of the country who are deeply opposed to this regime on principled grounds to organize themselves. Because who determines who's legitimate and who's not legitimate when there's no electoral mechanism in order to do that? And that is indeed one of the big challenges. That's one of the reasons why it was probably unrealistic to expect the regime to fall anytime soon. And that's one of the reasons why this war, unfortunately, is not going to help the aspirations of Iranian people. But it is important to say that there is very, very brave activists inside Iran, outside Iran, who are fighting for a democratic country. And I think for all of my skepticism about military adventurism and about the ability to bring about regime change by force, we move on, sometimes slightly too fast, from the bravery and the gender democratic aspiration that people in countries like Iran have. And I wish that there was ways in which we could help them.

B (32:58)

Well, there are these elections, essentially sham election, but even they allow for some expression of public discontent. And then the Mullers or the ayatollahs have to go in and sometimes allow or disallow the public's will to be to be followed. And this is even after they suppress the slate of candidates who are up for election. But it does show even sham elections do something to foment the yearning within, the yearning for freedom within people's breadth. Arrests everywhere. Do you have. Colin, we'll get off this in a second. I want to get to the more fun of more abstract debates about systems of governance. But when Yasha made the point about no matter what we do, we have war. Are you one who goes in for a totalizing explanation for this? Yes, because of, I don't know, military industrial complex or the tat, the. The tail wagging the dog with Israel policy. Or do you look, and this is how I look at it, that is true, but it is always for, or it is generally for a series of disconnected reasons that I think defy easy totalizing explanation.

C (34:07)

Yeah, I tend to agree with the latter position. There are maybe often a primary reason or like the catalyst, the big thing. But given the complexities of not just the world, but even just US bureaucracy and the structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and how we hear from

B (34:27)

our allies, here's the other temptation. Yes, Donald Trump loves using the military and showing his might and showing the power of America. But it is so very frustrating at a time when our institutions, our government institutions are collapsing and not working. And much of that by design of Doge and Trump. But you have the US Military, which is paid a lot of money and spends a lot of money, but is so much better at their job than any equivalent organization in our government or in any other government. You have this tool at your disposal and it's so impressive and they're so professional and everything about them comports with what Donna, the image Donald Trump wants to give. And it must be so tempting after certain successes where they could go and kill Baghdadi and they could go and extract Maduro with no loss of life. It must be. It must be so tempting not to use them. I want to say it, it must be so tempting to use them and not to use them. For a guy like Trump who's very transactional and maybe doesn't see around the edges of all his policies and is a short term thinker in many ways, it must be very hard not to say, well, we're going to use the best and the brightest and we're going to have a press conference and they're going to achieve some amazing things and it's going to reflect upon me. And that to me is the sort of habit that I don't think Donald Trump has. I don't think Donald Trump is able to avoid that temptation. All right, in a moment, do either of you want to say anything about that?

D (36:07)

Well, I'll just say I think the concerning thing here is that I think two instincts have been in conflict within the soul of Donald Trump. Now I am trying to get into his head, which is one, that he clearly is skeptical of foreign interventionism and is a kind of isolationist and doesn't really want America to be embroiled in the world. And second, that, as you're saying, you have command over this incredibly efficient and impressive war machine and you're somebody who likes to be the strong guy, you're somebody who likes to intimidate your opponents. It's going to be very tempting to use it. And as he spent more time in office and more time getting used to how to use the levers of power, he has seen how effective that can be in many contexts and he's gotten more and more tempted to use it. And so I just think that that is a worrying trend. And especially if he loses the midterms in November, as it looks like he probably will, especially in the House, perhaps in the Senate, you know, as his time in office is Going to come to a close. The temptation to say, this is the one area in which I don't really need to ask Congress about anything, which I can do what I want. I have this incredibly powerful weapon at my disposal. Let me make use of it. It's just going to keep getting stronger.

B (37:20)

All right, in a moment we're going to back up and get all abstract. These are not bombs on the ground. These are intellectual ideas sparking our imagination based on a two season series that Colin has constructed, which comports exactly with Yasha's area of expertise. Back in a minute with more Not Even Mad. We're back with Not Even Mad. And I have with me two esteemed intellects. Yasha Monk, who is many things, but one of them is he is the host of the Good Fight podcast. When I say I don't miss an episode, I literally mean it. And then there is Colin Cole, who is, among other things, the host of the Future of Our former Democracy podcast. And when I say I've been listening to season two, I also mean it. I listened to some of season one about Northern Ireland. Colin, give me the elevator pitch. But it's a really tall elevator going to the Burj Khalifa's top floor. You have the floor. Tell me what you're trying to do with your podcast.

C (38:28)

Sure. So the fundamental thesis of our podcast is that the United States today uses a radical, fringe, unstable electoral system that promotes extremist ideology and that is fracturing the nation that we live in. It's causing pernicious polarization, the increasing us versus them mentality where we don't see our political opponents as people with different ideas about tax policy, but as opponents, enemies. People who don't like the state the same way that we do. And this is called a winner take all electoral system. It's one of the least used electoral systems on the planet. Amongst democracies, the vast majority of other countries use a system called proportional representation. The fundamental concept of proportional representation is that if voters like you are a third of the population, you should have the power to win a third of the seats. Seats. If voters like you are the majority, you should win a majority of the seats in your government, but you probably shouldn't win everything. Proportional representation essentially stands in stark opposition to the concept of gerrymandering, that you should be able to manipulate the rules of elections and determine the outcomes by manipulating the borders and the boundaries and the voting population. And the thesis of our podcast is that other countries, like Germany, which we cover in season two, and Northern Ireland in Season one have had similar problems to the US where they have seen similar breakdowns of partisan politics, of polarization, of increasing violence between two political extremes that dislike each other, and that they have been able to resolve many of these conflicts by moving to systems of proportional representation. And we think that the United States would benefit from making a similar shift.

B (40:11)

Okay, Yasha, I know you're champing at the bit to talk about Germany specifically, but talk about what Colin just said and I'll throw out there. I don't think it's that rare. The U.S. has it. It, Brazil has it. I think France pretty much winner take all after a couple rounds of voting. The UK definitely has it. And also we invented democracy recently in 1787, so give us some slack, but you take it from there.

C (40:35)

Yeah.

D (40:36)

So I think there's two problems with the attempt to import proportional representation to the United States. The first is that there's simply no good evidence of proportional representation in general works better. And the second is that without completely scrapping the Constitution from scratch, it wouldn't be possible to use it in the United States. So on the first point, Germany was for a long time a system whose politics worked relatively well. But of course, there's many countries whose politics was famously incoherent because of proportional representation. When you look at much of Italy's post war history, when you look at Israeli democracy and many other countries around the world that had systems of proportional representation, where you had, as in the case of Italy, more than one prime minister per year, because you always had seven, eight different political parties involved in trying to form some kind of governing coalition, you were unable to get any kind of coherence from the government. Small parties were able to extract huge bribes and forms of corruption in order to support each government, because even though they had a tiny share of a nationwide vote, they could jump ship to the other coalition. And that made them very, very powerful. So the system has a lot of problems. The basic way to think about this from the perspective of political science is that you need to construct a majority in order to govern in a democracy. And that's a hard thing to do in any country of significant scale with people with very different political views. And you can basically do that in one of two ways. You can either do that by having a political system which forces people to create coalitions before the election. And that happens in a first past proposed system like the United States, where the winner is the person who gets the most votes. So you can vote for the Green Party, you can vote for the Libertarian, Party, you can vote for the monster raving loony party, that's an actual political party in the United Kingdom. But you're not going to most likely because you know that vote is going to be wasted, right? If you have any significant preference between Democrats and Republicans, you'll vote for the Democrats, even if you kind of dislike them because you really hate for Republicans, right? That means we don't have a lot of electoral choice. It means the primaries have way too much power. There's lots of bad things about it. But if I vote for the Democrats on the day of the election, I know what president I'm voting for, I know what senator I'm voting for, I know what government is going to form if my side of the aisle wins the election. In the system of proportional representation, what you do is to postpone forming the coalition until after election day. So on election day you're pretty happy because you have six, seven, eight different political offerings. And most likely one of those political offerings you kind of like. It is much more likely that there's a political party that actually represents your political views closely than in the United States. The problem is that the day after the election, those parties then have to get to 50% plus 1. And so what happened in 2021 at the last German elections was that if you voted for the center right fdp, you were happy on the day of the election because the party you likely voted for, but they then went into a collision with the Social Democrats in the Green Party, and they were the junior coalition partner giving the right votes for a left wing government to be in place. Well, in 2025, if you voted for the Social Democrats, which is a left wing party, you were happy on the day of the election. But then two days later it became obvious they were going to go into a coalition with the Christian Democrats on the right. And even though you vote for a left wing party, you actually helped a right of center government get into power. Once you have a rise of extremists, as you do in Germany as much as anywhere else, with the alternative for Germany continuing to grow in every single election, including in some state elections last week where the movement doubled the share of a vote, basically all of the traditional political parties need to be in coalition together to gobble together a majority. And so voters feel like nothing I do makes a difference. There's these four political parties, they're always in government together in some random commutation or permutation perhaps one of them sits out one election and the other one sits out the next. Election, but basically nothing ever changes. And the only way I can make any change is to vote for the far right populists, as Germans unfortunately are doing in greater and greater numbers.

B (44:54)

You're saying proportional representation is fostering, somewhat fostering the rise of the AfD?

D (45:02)

Absolutely, because they are the one anti system party. They are the one party that's not going to be in government with the others. Right. Any other party you vote for, it might be in the next coalition in some permutation that you can't predict before the day of the election. And so the only way to vote for political change is to vote for the AfD. Now, the AfD is a terrible political party with very dangerous views. It's not an alternative for me, but there's a logic to the system where people who are unhappy with a government, unhappy with what's currently happening with policy, saying the only way to get out of this is to vote for these anti system parties.

B (45:38)

Is that essentially what happened in France with the National Rally rallying everyone else around just the opposition and then there's a government and it's totally dysfunctional and can't get anything done?

D (45:50)

Well, the French political system is complicated because they have two round runoff systems. So they have a plurality system which is somewhat similar to the United States in the sense that the person who gets the most votes wins. But rather than doing it in one round, as happens in the United States, they do it in multiple rounds. Now, for the presidential elections, that means that there's only about two candidates in the final round for parliamentary elections. I think any party that gets more than 10% of the vote in the first round qualifies. So you have these weird runoffs between three or four different candidates and then you get a whole bunch of different political parties in Parliament, no coherent majorities. So the problem where there's no coherent majority in Parliament and therefore the country is ungovernable is similar to systems of proportional representation. The origin of it is a kind of sui generis political system that is kind of difficult to slot into either the German or the American camp.

B (46:48)

Right. So Colin, there you have it from Yasha. He points to the very country that you went to that you point to as an example of why this system would work well, as this system is very much damaging the country of Germany. Take it from there.

C (47:02)

Yeah, well, so first of all, I want to mention that the countries that don't use any form of proportional representation, like I mentioned at the top, are quite rare in terms of major democracies. It's really, the U.S. uK, France and Canada. And three of those, two of those are former British colonies, one is Britain. There are other countries that don't use a full proportional system like Australia. They use proportional representation to elect their Senate, but not their House. But the number of countries that use only a winner take all system is quite rare. So that established. Here's the thing with Germany. If you look to the 2025 election, the AfD, the far right party, got about 22% of the vote. Now go back in time to the year 2016 in the United States. If you look at the Republican primary elections, Donald Trump failed to win a majority of the vote in almost all of the state primaries. Most Republicans voted for Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich. And in fact, about half of Republicans were MAGA Republicans, which means if you take that for granted, that about half of the United States are Republican, about a quarter of US voters were MAGA Republicans. So a similar amount of the vote as the far right has in Germany. But then these two countries go down two very different paths. In the United States, this one fourth of the country that are far right end up taking over one of two political parties in the US and then from there they take over both chambers of the legislature and the presidency and the judicial branch. What happens in Germany? Well, that one quarter, one fifth of voters who support the far right remain at 1/4, 1/5 the population. They're one fifth of the legislature and they're shut out of power. They have not been able to take over the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats have continued to say that they will not go into government with the far right. And essentially they have remained isolated. And here's the other, the other thing I would argue, if you look at a seat map of the United States legislature, you know, the little dots in the little semicircle, the red dots and the blue dots, and you look at a seat map of the Germany Parliament, the Bundestag, or you look at even the Australian Senate in the United States, you're going to see a bunch of red dots. And some of those red dots are far right, authoritarian, anti democratic people, but you don't know who they are. They are wrapped in the legitimacy of the cloak of John McCain and Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. But you look at the Germany map and you know exactly which dots are the far right dots. It's the blue ones in Australia. You look at the orange dots, you know who the far right is. And there's some compelling political science that shows that knowing who the Far right anti Democratic actors are actually is useful at decreasing public support for those positions.

B (50:15)

Right? Yeah, I, that may be true, but I think there's in a logic in a crowded field of concluding that the person who finished first but didn't get the majority only got a plurality of votes. To conclude, therefore everyone who voted for something else, someone else voted against him. And especially in this case when you say, well, there were some far right people, the second biggest vote getter was Tim, Ted Cruz. I don't know how he's not considered a far right person out of the same flavor of Donald Trump. And of course then you have Rubio up there who's in the cabinet and then you have Huckabee up there who's in the cab or I got a.

C (50:56)

That's all true. But if you go back to 2015, you know, that's when you have Lindsey Graham saying he's a con man and he's not a member of my party and if we nominate him, we will deserve to lose. And you have Rubio saying to never trust this man. And you have Ted Cruz.

B (51:11)

Yeah, but what I'm saying is a different system would have had not Donald Trump just winning and sweeping into office as the, as the president. It would have had the MAGA party leading a coalition and then he would have gotten whatever. Let's invent a Ted Cruz faction.

C (51:27)

Sure.

B (51:28)

Or a Mike Huckabee faction. And then he still governs his MAGA and pretty much turns everyone maga. But Yasha, what did you want to say to Colin's recent points?

D (51:37)

Well, a few points. One is that I think there's more countries that have first pass opposed political systems. And Colin mentioned India and other former British colonies come come to mind. The second is. Yeah, the second is that there's a lot of countries which have systems of proportional representation in which populists rule. Hungary had a system of proportional representation when Viktor Orban was elected. Many other countries around the world had systems of proportional representation, and dangerous populists got elected. In fact, one of the striking things is that political scientists have spent a lot of the last 50 years in a kind of institutionalist moment trying to really think about how particular sets of institutions drive political outcomes. And populism doesn't fit that story very well because you see populist forces rising nearly everywhere around the world, even though political systems and the way in which democracies are actually operationalized are vastly different around the world. And so water finds its level. There's a strong demand for populist politicians and movements at the moment. We can debate about whether that's due to social media, due to dissatisfaction with our economic system, whether it's because in a lot of places policymakers just haven't delivered on what the preferences are of populations are. I teach a seminar where we go through all the different explanations, but electoral system just doesn't cut it as an explanation because you have populace and power in so many different places. And to look at one country like Germany, which has been very successful in the post war period economically, which has a comparatively homogeneous population compared to the United States, but certainly when you look at the voting population, you know, which is marked by a fear of extremism that is rooted in the experience of World War II and the Third Reich. And say because they have a system of PR, importing a system of PR to a different system is going to somehow deliver the same results is I think, simply a category mistake. I do want to speak to the second argument that I wanted to make as well, which is if we were at the origin here in the United States and we were designing a completely new system from scratch, I think that'd be an argument for proportional representation. I don't think it would be obviously the right argument because if you actually think through what that would look like in the United States, you would likely get the 20% MAGA party and the 15% theocrat party and the 7% Black Panther party and the 10% socialist party and the 15% Biden Democrats party in the 12% country club Republican party. And best of luck forming a government with that kind of constellation. But that might be better than the current system. I'm open to that. The problem is there's absolutely no coherent way to integrate proportional representation into anything like the current constitutional setup in the United States. But one thing you might be able to do if a Supreme Court plays along, which it might not, is to introduce proportional representation into the House of Representatives. But that gives you the worst of all worlds because then you have a House of Representatives chosen by proportional representation where anybody who can get two free, if you introduce an electoral threshold, perhaps 5, 6% of the vote gets represented in Parliament. So you get a whole bunch of fringe political movements and they, even if they manage to form a coalition, don't have a majority because the Senate is still going to be first past opposed and the way to elect the presidency is still going to be first past the post. So to have one House elected by proportional representation and the other Houses still elected by the system, that's going to Ensure that the Democratic and the Republican Party persist and keep the stranglehold over current political system is going to give you all the worst elements of proportional representation and all the worst elements of first past proposed all in one beautifully incoherent little, you know, object tied up with.

C (55:46)

With.

D (55:46)

With a bow that political scientists have created.

B (55:50)

Colin, why this particular reform that's going to be. That would be very hard to enact. What about it either appeals to you? Maybe I could see the story. AOC has said this. If we were in a different proportional representation, I wouldn't be a Democrat. I'd probably be a Green. I think she might be happier. Maybe you'd be happier not being a Democrat, being, you know, a Bernie Sanders socialist. Or why you is the question or why your organization. Is there something about more equitable democracy, a racial justice organization that looks at proportional representation as being closer to the goals of racial equity?

C (56:29)

Yeah, and I want to talk about that. But I also real briefly want to respond to something that Yasha said. First of all, there's no constitutional problem with adopting PR for the House of Representatives. You could actually do it by statute. There's been a bill introduced in Congress since 2017 called the Fair Representation Act. It would move the US House of Representatives to a proportional system, the same that they use in Australia and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and many other countries. That said, I agree, you can't simply cut and paste what another country has done. And how would that work?

B (57:03)

All the elections are run by the states.

C (57:07)

The Constitution vests the method of election for Congress in the Congress and then to be implemented by the states.

B (57:16)

Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay.

C (57:17)

So it's okay.

D (57:19)

So let's get so a look. Look. We'll see where the Supreme Court would play along with that. I think certainly there'll be lawsuits against it. And if you have absolute faith in the Supreme Court going along with it, then I have some news for you about the nature of the Supreme Court. But perhaps on the fairest legal analysis, the Constitution allows for proportional representation in the House. I'm very open to that. I think that likely is true. Whether or not the Supreme Court will go along with it, I think is a particular question. But let's leave it to the side. How would that work? Because presumably it is still the same states that are administering the election. So for once. So for one, you would only have, you know, one representative in North Dakota, you would only have three or four representatives in Delaware, etc. So it would never be a true system of proportional representation. In which the number of seats you get in parliament is actually proportional to the number of votes you get. Because this would be a state level system of proportional representation rather than a national level or of proportional representation.

C (58:19)

Right, that's true if you assume that the House of Representatives needs to stay at 435 members. But there have been proposals, including one that the New York Times endorsed back in 2018, where if you increase the size of the house to 538 and you adopted this Fair Representation act, now states like Wyoming would be the electing a proportional number of folks to the state legislature, to the national legislature.

D (58:44)

Well, no, because Wyoming has one representative now and you're increasing the size of a house by 25%. Then you know, perhaps they somehow get to two, but they're definitely not going to get to 10 or whatever.

C (58:55)

Right.

B (58:55)

Not every single two. They have less than a million people. But yeah, Wyoming was a rough choice. But you know, I guess let's say we could change absolutely everything. It's maybe interesting to think about. The questions were what's so appealing about this to you? To equity.

C (59:10)

Yeah.

B (59:10)

You know, even as something that if we acknowledge it can't happen. I batted around so much.

C (59:16)

We have to accept that our country is polarized. Like we do not get along. Rates of political violence are increasing. I mentioned this at the top, but it is not just, oh, I think the tax rate should be 35% and you think it should be 20%. It's I think you are evil and want to destroy this country and you are a threat to me and my family and you think the same thing about me. And we have seen what happens in democracies, not you literally, Mike, but, but the two different sides. We've seen what happens in countries where you have this level of pernicious polarization. It happened in Northern Ireland for over 30 years during the Troubles when Irish Catholics formed the IRA and you have the Irish Protestants forming the Ulster Unionists association and they are bombing each other, they are killing each other. And we are seeing that happen right now with assassinations of lawmakers, with the proud boys in antifa getting into brawls in the street. It gets violent. And that if you think that the political violence in the United States today is as bad as it's going to get and it's not going to get worse. I don't think you have been paying attention. And there's a reason why only about a third of young people say that they think democracy actually works, is even capable of solving problems. Three quarters of Young people today think democracy can't actually solve the problems that we're facing because the version of democracy that we are using doesn't inspire confidence. And so if democracy isn't working, that sort of only leads to two roads. And one is you change your democracy to hopefully make it better, and the other is you replace it with something more autocratic in terms of why we're interested in proportional representation at more equitable democracy. The foundational principle of the Voting Rights act of 1965, one of the culminating pieces of legislation from the civil rights movement, is recognizing that there is something called racially polarized voting, that there are times when black folks want one thing and white folks want something else, or Latino folks want one thing and white folks want something else, that this isn't always the case, but there are times when people of different races want different things. If you are in a racial minority, let's say your population is a third of the city council, council under a winner take all system, you will never win representation on the city council because you're a third. And that's not enough of the vote to win. But a foundational principle of American democracy is that we don't have only majority rule, but we also have minority representation. That's the whole point of the US Senate, that these smaller states with smaller populations shouldn't just get steamrolled. They should still have some guaranteed representation in government. And so the concept that appeals to us about proportional representation is if you take a relatively integrated, desegregated community where, say, Latino folks in rural California are a third of the population, but they have no representation in city government, but they have discrete political interests from the white majority that they should be able to elect their fair share of candidates. They shouldn't win everything on city council. They're only a third of the vote, but they shouldn't win nothing. And likewise, that 67% white majority, they should win a majority on city council if they vote cohesively based off of race, but they shouldn't win everything. And everything I just said about race, you could cross supply and apply to talking about partisanship, talking about age, talking about your positions on climate change. If a third of your city thinks we should invest in public transit, maybe it would be useful if one or two public transit advocates were on city council. Maybe that would more accurately reflect the views of the population.

B (62:59)

All right, I'll just say for context, Northern Ireland, country of 2 million people during the Troubles, would have hundreds of killings a year, maybe over 400 in 1972, according to the ADL and the Global Terrorism Task Force. The United states averages about 20 political motivated killings per year and we're a country of 330 million. So I think these are vastly, vastly different situations.

C (63:23)

To be clear, I'm not saying that the United States today is at all analogous to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. But I'm saying I think we are headed in that direction. And if you look at the rhetoric where you have candidates for governor, like the leading candidate for governor in North Carolina saying some people need to be killed and he's talking about the political opposition, you have seen the rhetoric get spicier. You have seen people call for violence. Donald Trump just said, now that Iran is dead, the next biggest threat to America is the Democrats. Like that is violent rhetoric. Like, you can't deny that there is an increasing call for thinking of your fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle as enemies, as an adversary, as a threat.

B (64:08)

Yes. And that candidate Mark Robinson ended up with 40% of the vote in a pretty red state in North Carolina in a non proportional representation election. But let us go now to our goat grinders, the things that might annoy us or get our goats. So I will lead us off. And this is kind of similar. It's kind of similar to what you were talking about. Donald Trump leading in the polls and not representing the majority of voters in California. They have many, many people running, but polling to any significant degree. 10 candidates. Now, of the 10 candidates, eight are Democrats and two are Republicans. And wouldn't you know it, the two Republicans, including a former Fox News host, now a radio host and the sheriff of Riverside, California, they're about 15, 16% of the vote. So things are going to shake out in California. Tom, Tom Stier or Eric Swalwell or Katie Porter will probably at some point get out of the race if she's or he's third best. The Democrats are not going to allow two Republicans to be the only ones on the ballot once the primaries are done. But, oh, do the headlines in the local press not reflect that? You can't not do it right. Democrats face the possibility of a historic upset in California's governor's race, says the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times. Other headline, scary time for California, California Democrats. It really shouldn't be. It should just be an organized time where they have to know what they're going to do. And another go grinder is, as I was reading, Nate Silver talking about Katie Porter and why she's not that popular. He linked to a headline he Wasn't commenting on it, but I will. Katie Porter faces backlash over behavior in interview. That was true. We all remember this. She yelled at an aide for being in her sightline. But here's the rest of that headline. Raising questions about double standards for women in politics. I guess it does. I mean. I mean, it raises a lot of questions. One of the questions being, why are you yelling at an aide during an interview? You could say it raises any type of questions and put that there after the comma. But Capital Public Radio, I don't think the best one is raising questions about when a woman yells at an aide. She's a bitch. But when a man yells at an aide, we give him a medal. All right, that's my goat grinder. My goat is ground Yasha. Do you have one?

D (66:30)

Yeah. You know, this is a oldie but goodie. The word problematic really gets my goat because I think it's just a way to paper over intellectual laziness. If you think that something is a problem, you should actually formulate why this entity or this person should be viewed negatively. And instead we resort to this word, oh, don't you know that this movie is problematic? And it's just meant to kind of cast a pall of suspicion over that movie. You're supposed to nod along, say, oh, yes. No, of course you're right. We're not going to go and watch this movie. You know, only a bad person would. Would watch this movie. Well, the person who's making this actually ever having to spell out their case. Right. Explain to me what's problematic about it. Right? Like this is a bad movie because X or Y or Z. And then you can say, oh, oh, that's a good point. Let's go watch a different movie. Or you can say, I don't know. That doesn't sound very convincing. I don't really have anything human to say here. I'm still going to go watch this movie. But to say, oh, you know that movie is very problematic. And then you move on with a conversation. It's really a terrible English word. And it didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago. The use of that word has exploded over the last 10 or 15 years. And I think it's a sign of a culture turning for the worse.

B (67:54)

Yeah, that's a great point. It's not just an annoying word. It's a Mobius strip of circular reasoning, isn't it? Why is it problematic? Well, because it's imbued with a quality of problems, like, why are you dyspeptic? Because I have dyspepsia. It just answers itself and, in fact, provides no answer.

D (68:10)

There's a tradition in moral philosophy which says that any morally evaluative language is just a way of saying boo. So if you say dictatorship is bad, you know, all that translates to is dictatorship, boo. I think that's actually wrong. I disagree with that school of thought. And you're saying to that school of thought. I am. But the word problematic is absolutely true of the word problematic. All that problematic. You know, this movie is problematic. All you're saying is this movie, boo. And you always, why? Why are you booing this movie? Give us a damn explanation.

B (68:40)

Thank you, Yasha, for problematizing problematic. And colon, colon. Colin, what do you have?

C (68:47)

My goat is a little more, I think, visceral, which is movie trailers. I think I should be made czar of all movie trailers, because almost all of them suck, because what they do is they give away way too much of the film. Your sort of standard Hollywood movie trailer is like, meet this guy and this girl who faced this problem together. This will happen. And then they solve it by ultimately doing this. And it just gives it all away. And that's been true for a long time. I'm gonna go ahead and spoil a couple movies now by telling you things from the trailer. In The Avengers from 2012, it reveals the climactic moment of when Iron man is about to die, falling to his death, and the Hulk saves him at the absolute last second in the World's End. An incredible film, part of the Cornetto trilogy with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. There's a. And I actually won't spoil this one, because I think you should go watch it. It's a great film, but there's a fundamental twist that makes the entire first half of the movie recontextualized that the trailers give away in two seconds. And right now, Project Hail Mary, if you ask me, the trailer for that movie that everyone has seen, it gives away the whole thing. So now when you sit down and watch the film the first 40 minutes, you already know where it's going, you know what it's going to be. You're just waiting for the real movie to start. And I think if you just went in with no expectation other than Ryan Gosling's going into space for a mystery, it would be so much more fun to watch.

B (70:19)

In a world where trailers don't give away the ending, will anyone go see the movie? Well, I want to thank you, Colin Cole, who's the director of Policy Outreach and communications at Moore Equitable Democracy, and Yasha Monk, founder and editor in chief of Persuasion, author of the Identity Trap, and his podcast is the Good Fight. Thank you guys both so much.

D (70:40)

Thank you.

C (70:41)

Thanks for having me. I'll be happy to keep talking with Yasha about this. I'm sure we have a lot to get into.

B (70:46)

Well, until that happens and until next time, we are not saying we're right. We're not saying you're right. We are saying we're not even mad. And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list, Ben Astaire is our booking producer, and Jeff Craig runs our Socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Benevolently improve, and thanks for listening.