Jean-Paul Faguet

And what you see is that there's enormous overlap amongst the parties all through the 20th century. So there were many Republicans who were to the left of many Democrats. So you go back to the 50s and 60s, many Southern Democrats were actually fairly right-wing people. And many liberal Republicans from the Northeast were actually fairly left-wing people.

And they belonged to one another party almost for tribal reasons or historical reasons, not for strictly ideological reasons. And when you see this visualization through time, they just separate. And now there's no overlap. And that's also scary because that's how you get the sort of dynamics in the House today where, you know, they vote en masse in favor or against.

And so there's almost no point in even having a vote in the House because, you know, as according to how many congressmen there are, you know, you know which way it's going to go with almost 100 percent certitude.

You can't imagine that now. There's another really scary result. This is from a brilliant political scientist, one of the great lights of his generation called Adam Baworski, who's now at NYU. He's emeritus now at NYU. And he's done a bunch of brilliant comparative political scientists.

who studied democratic stability and instability across the world, but in particular across the well-established, highly institutionalized democracies. And what he finds is that the American-style system of presidentialism and separation of powers only really works in the United States of America. Many, many, many countries have copied this system. All of Latin America copied it.

And it doesn't work anywhere except for the U.S. So again, American exceptionalism, except kind of in its dark form, because this system is only worked up to now in the U.S., everywhere else in the world, Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, where you have a really effective steam valve, sort of an escape valve.

When conflict gets very high, you just have a vote of no confidence, you bring down the government, it triggers an election, and then you get a new constellation of parties, representatives, and

You know, either the same party comes back, but in a new form, or you get a coalition, or the other party, you know, Labour wins, as just happened now in the UK, thank God, because the old government was just a disaster.

You don't have that in the American system, where, you know, a party that's hobbled, like, staggers on, and resentment builds up, and then finally you get an election, you know, after four years, and God only knows what happens then. And this is kind of scary, because... This is not necessarily what he argued. I'm kind of bringing his argument to the current day.

But this ideological overlap that we used to have that you mentioned between Republicans and Democrats is part of what made this exceptional American system work. And now they segregated. And I think now is an open question as to whether it can continue working. Especially when the ideological polarization hits the Supreme Court, right? Exactly, yeah. It's absolutely everywhere.

Yeah, so there are two separate issues here. One is a parliamentary system versus an American-style presidential system, and the other is a system of voting. So here, you know, compare the U.S. at one end to Britain in the middle to a continental European country on the other end, where they have proportional representation. The U.K.

still has first-past-the-post, so in any constituency, like in the U.S., only one person is going to win that seat, and if you get, you know, 20% of the vote, you still lose the election and they elect somebody from one of the main two parties. So you're really penalized for being the third party. In Europe, you have proportional representation.

So if you win 10% of the vote, you're going to get 10% of parliament. And then, A, you're there. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats are nowhere. Well, they're not nowhere, but they're well below their... Actually, the better example is the recent right-wing Reform Party, which I don't like at all, of Nigel Farage, who won something like, I can't remember now, it's either 15 or 20% of the vote.

I think it was around 15% of the vote. And I think they only got one or two seats in parliament in a parliament of 600 plus seats, right? So, I mean, they won out of all proportion to their representation. Whereas in PR, then you win 10%, you have 10% of representation, you have a voice in parliament, and it's likely you're gonna be involved in some sort of coalition government.

So the way political scientists think about this is that first past the post takes relatively small electoral majorities and turns them into big legislative majorities. Right. The Labour Party in this last election quite recently only won 35 or so percent of the vote, but they have a huge stonking majority. I mean, a vast majority in Parliament.

And so they can do all kinds of things and pass legislation. Walter Badgett, a constitutional thinker and one of the most important editors of The Economist magazine, called it an electoral dictatorship. Because there's so much power. It's interesting because it's much more powerful than the American executive, but it's also much more brittle and then it can fall. Right. Right.

I mean, you've seen how many prime ministers cycled through just over the past couple of years in the UK. when there was one American president, right? But then each of those prime ministers could do things that are beyond the wildest dreams of an American president in terms of changing policy or passing legislation.

Yeah. Well, your parliamentarians can stop you if they start words. Let's say things are going badly. So let's just run the current experiment in the UK forward. And let's say that for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and the new government becomes unpopular in a couple of years time. Now, you know, they have a mandate for up to five years.

It's the prime minister can choose when he calls an election. And so he has the power to choose an election at the moment that is best for him or her. But in principle, it's up to five years. But let's say he gets very unpopular because he makes some dumb policies and or there are some macro shocks to do with the war in Ukraine or the economy or something along these lines.

If his own parliamentarians start worrying that they're going to lose their seat by continuing to support his government, they're going to just turn against him. And so you saw this when the shoe was on the other foot with the Tories during all of the morass, the debacle with Brexit, debacle for the country, but also debacle for the Tory party that prosecuted it.