Yes, on a number of dimensions. The US political-party system is an outlier simply for the strictness of its two-party duopoly. There are plenty of other comparable countries like the UK or Canada that have two predominant parties but nevertheless have significant minor parties that occupy a subnational level of government. In the United States, the strictness of its two-party system has been quite profound — whether it’s Republicans and Democrats, or if you want to go back earlier, Whigs and Democrats, and even earlier Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

It’s related to another way in which American parties are so weird: organizationally, they’re really weak. By which we mean, they’re porous; they’re penetrated easily by social forces with popular backing and significant resources at their command, and which can thus influence these parties to a considerable degree.

These two points are related, because if you have weak parties and you are an insurgent social movement, why would you start a third party from scratch when you can just directly intervene in, try to influence, and potentially even take over one of the major parties?

White men without property had enormous access to the vote early on. Whereas in Europe, all kinds of tax and property restrictions kept the franchise quite small well into the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. The ultimate upshot of this is that in the United States, democracy came before state-building parties could use their access to office, and the resources that came with controlling the office, with controlling job permits, with the funds that come with access to the federal government, state governments, and so on.

They could essentially use these to buy votes. Two major coalitions grew up around competitively trying to use the state to rally voters to their side and to out-mobilize the other,  while oftentimes trying to demobilize their partisan rivals’ electors.

They navigated it in a few different ways. One was that there were a whole bunch of institutional arrangements that insulated Southern conservative Democrats who, in addition to quite obviously being virulent racists, were also profoundly anti-union. Those two things were linked in interesting ways. Nevertheless, they were part of the New Deal coalition.

But because of the way that Congress and the party worked, there were all kinds of mechanisms by which the Southern Democrats were able to exercise influence, almost a veto-level control over who the party nominees would be, and what kind of issues would be brought up for debate within the House or the Senate. By these mechanisms, they were able to filter things out of the Democratic New Deal agenda that they perceived to be major threats to the Southern political economy and the Jim Crow racial order.

That said, this was also the party of the New Deal agenda and the labor movement, especially after the mid-1930s. These two forces within a singular coalition were bent on one another’s destruction — especially once it was clear that the unions were trying to move south with what at the time was called Operation Dixie, to unionize the South. As soon as it was clear that Southern Democrats were going to continue to veto extending aspects of the New Deal and strengthening labor unions further, you basically had a dominant electoral coalition that lasted thirty years where the two principal players were at each other’s throats.

That’s right. The institutional power of the presidency that Roosevelt was so keen on building was a clever way for him to get around the Democratic Party. He had initially entertained some ideas that he could remold the Democratic Party in his image. Roosevelt tried to influence primary elections in the South to get people that were more inclined to a progressive vision of the New Deal, to be elected to the Southern delegations either in the House or the Senate. But those were largely failures.

Roosevelt basically abandoned his project of trying to transform the party as an organization and started building out the executive as a way for him to act a little bit more unilaterally, without those same kinds of constraints.

Exactly. The Democratic Party lacked what is today called the charter, but what we would recognize as a party constitution. It lacked a national structure like that. There weren’t always fifty states, but if we assume there are fifty, there are basically fifty parties. The Democratic parties in every state were basically federated together and would meet once every four years in the convention. That’s the sovereign body. But those people coming from those different states are not bound to one another or any aggregated body that we would recognize as a national party.

No, there were no dues-paying members. There were at times, usually at the behest of liberal reformers, efforts to build these kinds of things — to create a monthly newsletter or a weekly magazine. Today they would be doing podcasts or something like that to create more of a coherence. But these initiatives were never sustained. They were always ad hoc and certainly did not accomplish their goals.

There are a lot of moving parts to this but to try and keep it as manageable as possible: the Democratic Party had enormous support — not always visible, but critical levels of support from labor unions at various scales. The civil rights movement shattered this alliance. This is not at all to say that had the civil rights movement not happened, this coalition would have been fine. The contradictions in this coalition ran really deep and were clearly festering from the late ’30s on. But by 1964, this is exploding out into the open, often in ways that directly implicated these party structures by which Southern delegations were able to insulate themselves from the more liberal progressive wings of the party.

Perhaps most famously at the 1964 convention, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was set up as a parallel party, sent rival delegations to Lyndon Johnson’s coronation in Atlantic City, basically pressing the contradiction to the fore by saying Mr President, you just signed the Civil Rights Act — surely the position of this national party is pro–civil rights. Yet you are seating segregated, all-white delegations that are coming out of what political scientist Rob Mickey calls the “authoritarian enclaves” of the Southern United States.

They challenged Lyndon Johnson and all members of the Democratic leadership to reconcile this contradiction. What are you going to do? Do you want us in the party, or do you want them? That was not resolved to civil rights activists’ satisfaction in 1964. But by 1968, and then later in 1972, the party was undertaking internal reforms that mandated equal access and equal opportunity along lines of sex, gender, race, and later sexual identity.

They’re really remarkable. They are, historically speaking, the single greatest moment of party reform in American political history. And they are a piece of reform that I think is largely overlooked by people in liberal-left circles today, even though it was almost an unparalleled victory for those forces.

Those that were continuing to push civil rights into the party, those that were actively trying to get an antiwar position embraced in the party platform, and those who we would later associate with second-wave feminism and even the nascent LGBTQ movement all broke onto the scene and influenced the backdoor negotiations that happened between the 1968 and 1972 conventions. That dramatically changed how delegates are selected for the convention.

Very radical. And there’s an element of unintended consequence in here, if you look carefully at what these reformers were trying to do. Some of them preferred caucuses. Others were fine with primaries. So long as they were married to more frequent national meetings — not just quadrennial presidential nominations, but meetings where members of the party would get together to discuss strategy platforms, et cetera.

But the way things shook out based on victories won and victories lost was that we had a proliferation of primaries. It just became the easiest way for states to accommodate the new party rules by imposing the primary system that we have today. That affects not just how Democrats select their nominees, but also how Republicans do so.

A lot of the counterreformers were a group we would have in 1968 identified as classic, mainstream, New Deal liberals. A significant portion of this group become what we later call “neoconservatives”: hawkish on foreign policy, virulently anti-communist. They had a big problem with the antiwar movement as seen to be coddling the North Vietnamese, but they had a very good record on labor unions and civil liberties and civil rights.

These are folks that ended up defecting to the Republican Party over the course of the 1970s. Many of their top leaders ended up taking administrative positions in Ronald Reagan’s White House and then the George W. Bush White House later on.

They were folks who were, to use their words, disgusted with the excesses of the 1960s movements. As the quote goes from an AFL-CIO labor leader, when he attended the 1972 convention, “There’s too much hair and not enough cigars at this kind of convention.” There were many more women in the party. There were many more people of color. There were people that had diverse sexual identities. Those kinds of things which, at the time, were quite out of the mainstream. They ultimately wanted to turn back the clock — they wanted to return to a New Deal heyday that they thought could probably have been prolonged past the late 1960s.

Though I think we could question whether that was ever a reasonable goal, they scored some important things. They entirely scuttled the membership plans to remake the Democratic Party in a much more social democratic, European mold. They scuttled much of the centralization plans.

But they were not able to turn back the clock on how presidential nominees are selected. Those became institutionalized. Notwithstanding McGovern’s wipeout in 1972, the fact that Jimmy Carter used this kind of system to slip by most of the party bosses and effectively bring the Democratic Party back into the White House in 1976 probably had a lot to do with allaying some of those major fears and making a full-scale counterrevolution not just unviable, but maybe even undesirable.

The DLC’s first goal, in the new Democratic movement that it embodied, was to change the party organizationally. They thought they could be a kind of reform force that could conquer the existing organizations within the Democratic Party and institutionalize their influence in ways like the McGovern reformers had done in the late 1960s.

That project largely failed. They were not able to get a toehold in the party like that. Over the course of their revolution through the 1980s, they really ended up shifting their strategy toward a more ideological and policy-driven accommodation with what they argued was the obvious more or less Reaganite mainstream of America.

Of course, there are also lasting policy changes — welfare reform, reforms to the financial system — of which we know the consequences. Those kinds of things had lasting consequences for the party and for the nation as a whole. But you have to remember a lot of those key reforms came after the 1994 Republican revolution — the Gingrich revolution in those midterm elections. And President Clinton was relying on bipartisan coalitions to get those things through. There were huge numbers of congressional Democrats that were defecting. They did not go for welfare reform. They did not go for conservative finance reform.

So there was a way in which this rightward turn, the neoliberalization of the Democratic Party, had a major influence through the ’90s and into the early 2000s. But looking back from even the earliest days of Barack Obama, let alone how things look from 2021 to 2022, I think it’s very easy to exaggerate the Clintonite influence over the party. In the 1990s, they held the leadership, and leaders are going to have enormous sway over setting the agenda and defining the image of the party. But I’m very skeptical of claims that the third way, “New Democrat” movement was able to effect lasting change over the long term.

It speaks to what the presidential organization of our parties is, parties that have become centered around what happens in the executive. Whereas if you go back to what the founders probably envisioned, it was more of a congressionally centered political system, since that’s the only thing that they had experienced before.

It’s a real dilemma in the sense that this is basically up to the personal whim of the president and party leader. It was George McGovern who said, to be president, you already have to be crazy. These are ambitious people. It’s remarkable that someone as ambitious as Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson left the presidency or gave it up.

Although the two scenarios are very different, Biden obviously dug in. He was adamant. Which was in amazingly sharp contrast to the grip that Donald Trump has over his party, all of his liabilities notwithstanding. If we had a parliamentary system, this would have been more straightforward.

That’s the million-dollar question, and I think it’s one that political scientists and many others are going to be puzzling over for a long time. I’m not sure we’ve ever had a comparable case in the United States to the domination that Trump has been able to exert over an existing major political party. It confounds, in one way or another, most of the existing political-science theories of how parties work.

To give you one example, we often think Trump climbed to power by changing where he stood on a bunch of issues. We know that historically, Trump had been pro-choice. So he became pro-life. We know that Trump had little relationship to guns, though he’s had a long history of promoting law-and-order issues, especially about the Central Park Five and others. But he gets an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. All this seemed to fit. He was checking the boxes off the coalition.

What we’ve seen in the last few years, especially since the Dobbs decision, is Trump actually pushing back hard on some of these groups. At least as abortion has become a little bit more of a complex issue in the post-Dobbs era. He is emphatically not for a national ban. He seems to understand completely that this is an electoral liability. He has selected a vice-presidential nominee who has changed his position on this, from a national ban on abortion to something more like the Trump position of just leave it to the states.

If you take a look at the party platform that’s been issued for this upcoming election cycle, it probably mentions abortion as few times as maybe the 1968 Republican Party platform did. It has become for this party almost a nonissue as measured by the platform. That’s not a perfect measure of where that issue stands in the party, to the extent to which it motivates its voters, or even the standing to which the pro-life movement has. But it is a dramatic departure from 2016. This is a document that reads as if Trump wrote it himself (which we know he did not, because it would be probably much, much shorter). But it is a document that in almost every way reflects his personal preferences. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a party platform like this before.

Not without primary elections, and if we wanted to push this back further, without the kerfuffle within the Democratic Party after the post-1968 reforms, you would never get primary elections, and you would never get Trump. All of which is not to say the 1968 reformers are responsible for Trump. But in a party system where the party organization, or its backbencher equivalents, or even its donors, have some veto power over who is or is not going to be the nominee, we would have never gotten Trump. We might have not ever gotten Barack Obama.

But that’s not the system we have. Despite vocal opposition from basically every wing of the party, from apparent kingmakers like Fox News, former hosts of Fox News, or Rupert Murdoch himself, who has had a mixed relationship with Trump — all these apparent kingmakers, Trump just cut through all of them. As far as the research suggests, it’s because the party base was already there.

There are a lot of things that we can point to that appear to be pretty significant continuities between the Biden administration and previous Democratic administrations, or even the two-party Washington consensus. We can look at Biden’s commitment to Israel through the war in Gaza. We can look at his foreign-policy views around the expansion of NATO. We can look at some of the privatization of Medicare and other aspects of the health system.But I think the discontinuities have been really incredible.

I would argue that, while continuing to pale in comparison to the ideal of what a Democratic administration could be, Biden is probably the most progressive president in modern history — certainly as progressive as Lyndon Johnson. although he achieved a little less than Johnson. He was more pro-labor in some ways than Franklin Roosevelt ever was, who accommodated (because he had to) an alliance of convenience with the labor movement and understood what they could give him depending on what he gave them.

Whereas here, you have Biden walking the picket line and proposing the most dramatic expansion of the American health care system that we’ve ever seen. The House passed the PRO Act; the House passed the Minimum Wage Act. All these things die in the Senate because Biden did not have the numbers that you need to get legislation through a de facto supermajority Senate chamber. But it’s all the more dramatic that, even with the razor-thin majorities he had through 2021 and 2022, he even tried to do such an ambitious thing.

You can’t just declare the end of neoliberalism, as Biden effectively did when he said, trickle-down economics is over, we’re moving away from that. You need to do more than just declare it. You need to follow through with durable substantive changes in how the political economy is structured, and he largely failed to achieve many of those. But his ambition was very surprising.

I think it actually speaks to the relative strength of progressives in this party since 2016: The fact that Bernie Sanders’s insurgency took so many people by surprise. The fact that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, which left many people scratching their heads as to, well, maybe we need to rethink how we’re presenting ourselves to the electorate. And then Biden’s personal decision, to try to accommodate the left wing of the party to the extent that he could try and bring the progressive bloc in to have continual negotiations with them. He put Bernie in a position of significant authority inside the Senate on the Budget Committee.

These things didn’t achieve what I think maybe they could have under other circumstances, but this is a Democratic Party coalition that is itself changing.

Yeah. But in just the same way, given that age of leadership, in ten years, they’re all going to be gone. We’re going to have significant turnover in the Democratic Party leadership over the next cycle or two. All these people, whether by natural causes or just by retirement from professional life, will be gone from the scene: Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. Presumably Barack Obama will be around for a while. But even Bernie, I’m sorry to say, will be gone soon. That’s going to be an opportunity for the Democratic Party leadership to come more into line with what the party looks like at the subleadership level.

Terribly, even though I would posit that he acted exactly how you’d expect any American president to act in such a crisis.

I agree. A big part of my book is that elections produce winners and losers, not just between the parties but within them. Every nomination, there’s always risk involved. There’s always some prediction, some prognostication about what’s going to work and what isn’t. So when those things fail, like it did in 2016 for the Democrats, there’s always a bunch of head-scratching, relitigating debate over the subsequent year or so following that.

What was remarkable to me about the debate over Biden stepping down is the degree to which it was so focused on Biden and his age rather than his policy positions, or his efforts to go big and go bold, or his “middle-out” economic agenda. So there is a future where Trump wins this election and Democrats go back to the drawing board and say, we can never nominate an elderly old white man again. What we wouldn’t probably hear are the latter-day centrists saying Biden lost because he was too progressive.