The Ongoing Crisis of American Politics, Pt. 2

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This is the second part of our conversation with Sanjiv Gupta and Paul Heideman about U.S. politics, conflict within the Republican Party, and the current state of American democracy. We invited Saniv and Paul back onto the podcast as a follow-up to their 2022 presentation at the Socialism Conference in Chicago.

Sanjiv Gupta is a member of the River Valley DSA chapter in Western Massachusetts and a sociologist at UMass-Amherst.

Paul Heideman is a writer and high school teacher in NYC. He is the editor of Class Struggle and the Color Line, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Dissent, and In These Times.
Transcript:

Luke: This is CLASS, the official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee. My name is Luke Pickrell. This is part two of our conversation with Sanjiv Gupta and Paul Heidman. Sanjiv is a member of the River Valley DSA chapter in Western Massachusetts and is a sociologist at UMass Amherst.

Paul is a writer and high school teacher in New York City. He's also the editor of Class Struggle and The Color Line, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Descent, and In These Times. Our conversation continues just where we left off in Part 1. Enjoy.

The discussion around breaks, dirty breaks, and what's happening in the Republican Party kind of dovetails nicely into the next question I wanted to ask, which is also in your 2022 presentation. You said both parties are structurally weak, implying, of course, that, the Democratic Party is also structurally weak in some ways.

And we've talked about how this Palestine anti-APEC section within the Democratic Party. So, curious, Paul, if, if you could start, and then Sanjiv, of course, you can come in. Is the Democratic Party weak? weak? If so, how? And then could we see someone running on the Democratic Party ballot line on a Palestine angle or a true democracy, democracy angle?

Paul: there are a couple of different senses of party weakness that are related, but are, that are worth distinguishing. One is simply like electoral fortunes, you know, like a weak party is a party that fails electorally. In some senses, I would say, look, the Republican party, for most of my lifetime, has been weak. The Republican party has won the popular vote once since 1988. Right? 2004 was the only time that in the presidential election, the Republican Party won the presidential vote. That's kind of a stunning record, right? In some senses, we're living in a period of Democratic Party electoral dominance. Now, the Electoral College, you know, and the Supreme Court together have meant that that hasn't always translated into who holds the presidency.

But that's, that's, so, so just kind of how you do in the election. That's one index of party weakness. Another is the party as an institution and how able the leaders of that institution are to get what they want. And in that sense, I think both parties are weak, in comparison with earlier periods of American history and in comparison with like European parties in most senses.

And, there's a couple of ways this is true. What one is just the primary system. The primary system means that the party leadership does not get to pick candidates. They can put their thumb on the scale, right? But they don't get to just pick the candidate, which they used to be able to do in American parties. And what that means is that like, look, that's how Trump. You know, took over the Republican Party, right? It was thr

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