Fiona Hill

To be honest, I've always found American politics somewhat confounding because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents.

I mean, they're coalitions.

In Europe, it's actually kind of, in some respects, easier to navigate the parameters of political parties because you have quite clear platforms.

There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously.

I mean, there's a long history here in the United States of the development of the parties going back to the late 18th century.

But in the United Kingdom, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties was quite easy to get a handle on.

You know, at one point in the UK, for example, the parties were real genuine mass parties with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings and paid dues.

And, you know, it was easy to kind of see what they stood for.

And the same in Europe, you know, when you look at France and in Germany and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere.

Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous.

You know, the fact that you could kind of register, you know, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican, like Trump did.

At one point he's a Democrat, next thing he's a Republican.

And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus.

But you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way.

You're not kind of, you know...

They don't check you out to see if you have ideological coherence.

You could have someone like Bernie Sanders on the other side, on the left, basically calling himself a socialist and running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

So in many respects, parties in the United States are much more loose movements.

And I think you can, you know, it's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu of different things that people can pick out.

And it's more over time, as I've noticed, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with the sporting team.