Lynn Schmidt, Columnist and Editorial Board member with the Post-Dispatch,Β talks with former Congressman Mickey Edwards and author of βThe Parties Versus the People. How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans.β
Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years, serving as the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He was also a founding member of the Heritage Foundation. He is now a registered Independent.
Edwards worries about the rise of authoritarian populism and about the lack of responsiveness and dysfunction of our government. Luckily, Edwards has some suggestions and shares that the power rests with all of us.Β
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Headliner and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Lynn Schmidt: Hi, my name is Lynn Schmidt, and welcome to the What Keeps You Up at Night? Podcast, the show where we discuss the big issues and worries facing America and the world, and then begin the conversations about how we can go about solving them. I am a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post of Batch. I will be interviewing experts and politicians from across the country, from right to left on the political spectrum, as well as spanning the generations. It is my pleasure to welcome Mickey Edwards. Mickey was a member of Congress for 16 years, serving as a ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee and chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He chaired policy task force forces for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign and was National Chairman of the American Conservative Union and a founder of the Heritage Foundation. Today, he is a registered Independent. After his congressional career, Mickey Edwards taught government and public leadership at Harvard and Princeton for the next 15 years. After taking a break to create a bipartisan leadership program for elected officials, he returned to teaching at Princeton, where he is now a visiting professor. He has also been a weekly political columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers, and a weekly political commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. His most recent book is The Party Versus the People how to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans. Welcome to the podcast, Mickey.
Mickey Edwards says populism can lead to an authoritarian government
Lynn Schmidt: So my first question is, Mickey, what keeps you up at night?
Mickey Edwards: Hi, Lynn. Glad to do this. I think what keeps me up at night are a couple of things. One, obviously, is the authoritarian threat. And I think we do have an authority, you call it populism, but, it can lead to an authoritarian government. That concerns me. I am concerned that, it seems that very few people in either political party, and left or right, really care anymore about democratic process, deliberation, compromise. People tend to just want what they want and seem not to continue to think that the process by which free people come to their decisions really matters. but I think that when I look at, the prospect of what might be happening in next year's election, frankly, it is the idea that somebody who committed, I'd say an insurrection the charges exactly, insurrection, may actually get the nomination of a major political party. And that says something about us. It says something about the country, if that would happen.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, I consider the polls being as close as they are between Biden and Trump. Now, of course, we're in a very polarized society, but the fact that the polls are so close and they're essentially, it seems shocking to me, considering the actions of the former president.
Mickey Edwards: Yeah, I think it's shocking. Lynn. So you use the word polarization, and we do have some pretty sharp polarization, but we also have a problem with partisanship. And that is and they're different things. A lot of people use them interchangeably, but they're very different. and partisanship is that you have people I know people who don't, like Donald Trump, they don't like his behavior, they don't particularly like anything he does, but he is their so you're going to stick with your party against the other party, and that's not the way the founders intended our system to work. So, that book you just mentioned, the Parties versus the People, is about how the political party system, has forced us into this position.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, I definitely want to talk about your book, and the details of what you wrote in it.
Mickey Edwards says he left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump
Lynn Schmidt: But I was hoping, before we get into the substance of that, maybe you would share with listeners how you went from being an active member of the Republican Party and conservative movement to a registered Independent.
Mickey Edwards: well, first of all, even, when I was in Congress, I was a little bit independent in the sense that Lynn, I had kind of a mantra for myself, just talking to myself of three things that would decide how I was going to vote on anything. it was, what did my constituents think, what did they want, what did my own conscience tell me was the right thing to do, and what did the Constitution say was permitted and what was not permitted? And so I was close to Ronald Reagan. I shared his policy task forces when he was elected in 1980, but I voted against him a lot of times. I voted against George, H. W. Bush when he was president, a number of times. So, what concerns me now is that we've allowed the party structure to so dominate that I left the Republican Party. That's true. I left the Republican Party and I left it because of Donald Trump, and I left it because of the even more than Donald Trump, because of the people who I knew weren't like him, but supported him anyway. And, when there was this forgiveness for January 6, when there was this pretense that he had won the election, I just said, this is something I can't be part of. But the idea of being independent in the sense of not going along with the party, just whatever it did, I've always been that way.
Lynn Schmidt: So you wrote, your book, The Parties Versus the People how to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans in 2012. It seems that over the last eleven years since you wrote the book, the state of our politics has not gotten any better. In fact, it's probably gotten a lot worse.
Mickey Edwards: Nobody read my book. Maybe you and I.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, I enjoyed it very much. So maybe you could, talk about the substance a little bit about that you wrote in the book, sort of the issues. And then we can kind of talk about how we might get ourselves.
Mickey Edwards: Out of this situation when we call ourselves a democracy. Let me clarify just how I think about that. Our government is a constitutional republic. It's an institution based constitutional republic. But we have attached to that a democracy in terms of how we select our leaders, who's going to make those decisions, and that presupposes if it's a democracy, that the decisions of who sits in the Senate, who sits in the House, will be the people who got the majority of the vote from their constituents. We have a system which is being managed today by Congress, made up of people who never got a majority of them. we have, in most states, plurality elections in the primaries. So it's a series of steps. Lynn, you have a closed primary in which only the people in your party, can vote for a nominee if you don't win that primary, if you finish second, even if you would have been by far the most popular for the entire electorate. But you didn't win the primary because those people are going to be a little more partisan and a little more ideological. You can't run in the general election. Yeah, there's something called sore loser laws in 46 states that if you don't win your party primary, no matter how few people voted or how few votes the, quote, winner got, you can't run. And so we end up at the end of the process, if you are the person who, in that way won, let's say, the Democratic primary, and in the general election, you win in a heavily Democratic district, I mean, state. If it's a statewide race, then you never know what the people really would have done if they had had all the choices that were available to them, as you should have in a democracy. So, when you look at what's happening in Congress, these are decisions made by people who represent a minority, not a majority of the population.
Lynn Schmidt: Most states, I'm coming to you from Missouri, we're pretty gerrymandered, and I think most states have that same issue.
Mickey Edwards: Well, it's two issues. One gerrymander that is a problem. The other part of it is that we have ourselves divided ourselves into states that are mostly red states or blue states. And, a friend of mine, Bill Bishop, wrote a book called The Big Sword, talking about how Americans more and more choose to go live where people think the way they do. And so, when I was at Congress, I was a Republican. Most of the members of that delegation were Democrats. Almost every state had some Republicans and some Democrats, in their congressional delegations. That doesn't happen anymore.
Lynn Schmidt: Now, that surprises me. I don't know how many Democrats are in the Oklahoma delegation anymore.
Mickey Edwards: None. Zero. Yeah. And when I was there, we had two Republican senators, one Republican congressman was me and five Democrats. It was bipartisan, or at least mixed in almost every state. That's just gone now.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, it wasn't that long ago that Missouri was a bellwether, but no more.
Polls show trust in almost every social institution has plummeted
Lynn Schmidt: so you mentioned about institutions, poll after poll shows that trust in almost every social institution has plummeted. And there have definitely been attacks on those institutions from elected officials, for sure. But it also seems to me that many of those institutions have not helped themselves at all. They're somewhat complicit in the loss of trust. So it seems to me like.
Lynn Schmidt: Our institutions are getting hammered from all sides, and I'm not sure how we get those back.
Mickey Edwards: Well, I'm really glad you said that, because can I broaden the conversation.
Lynn Schmidt: Just yeah, absolutely, of course.
Mickey Edwards: one of the things that's happening, as much as I dislike Trump, there are legitimate grievances. We have, an economy, in which more and more, we have very wealthy people, and people who are struggling. We love having a global community, but there are a lot of people who don't benefit from that global community. Their local businesses, are going under, or, their factories, or the places where they made a living. We more and more have people who are left behind, and their grievances are legitimate. And, one of the things Trump was smart enough to do was to see those, grievances and play to them, say, I'm your champion. But, it affects how the institutions behave, too. So you're a journalist? Ah, I'm a journalist. I still think I'm a journalist. I have a journalism degree. I was a newspaper reporter and a newspaper editor before I did op eds and columns and all that stuff. a lot of our publications today newspapers, have taken the old line that the editorial page had opinion and the news pages had fact.
Lynn Schmidt: Right?
Mickey Edwards: And now you pick up any of the papers and they are just full of opinions scattered throughout the news stories. New York Times versus Sullivan protected the newspapers, and also protected their right to tell things that were not true without being punished in return. You couldn't sue them. There are just a lot of things, ah, the ways in which working class people struggle to pay their bills, to set aside money for education, to pay too much for almost everything. That's a problem in America. Ah, you can understand why some people are grabbing the pitchforks and saying, we don't care how we do it, we just have to change it.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, I mean, I think about after, the 2008, financial crisis, there seemed to be m no accountability for the banks. You think about the sexual scandals within the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, and there's very little accountability there. And things like that. I also thought about Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers, and how we are living in an epidemic of opioid overdoses and we're just playing defense at this point. People are right, I think, not to trust their institutions, but then when they also get attacked, it just makes for a very bad situation.
Mickey Edwards: Yeah, it does. And we've conflated some things. Linda. I am a very strong believer in capitalism. Capitalism has done more to make more people healthier and, in every way to benefit with things they could not have had before. But corporatism and capitalism are two different things. Governments have allowed people to form corporations, so they're created by government action, and exchange. As a corporation, you become not personally liable for things that your corporation does wrong. You get tax benefits. And that was all done with the idea that you are going to, be doing good things. By you having the ability to access this capital, you're going to be able to do good things for society. Well, when you have corporations that are avoiding taxes, or where they're getting these tax breaks and personal avoidance of personal liability from the state, but they're hiring all their workers overseas, shifting things like that, that's a problem. I think that we can't just be upset about what's happening from the far right or from populism or whatever it is, without acknowledging that there's some reason that people really angry.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, absolutely.
One example is changing the election systems to open primaries
Lynn Schmidt: so one line from your book that I loved, and this can take us into the next section you wrote, the beautiful thing about our governmental system is that in the end, the power rests with us. So what can we do then? If the power rests with us, how do we get that power?
Mickey Edwards: it may be a slow process. One, of them is what I talked about in terms of changing the election systems. If we, had open primaries, if we're going to have primaries, if we had open primaries, and we required runoff so that nobody got elected who did not have the actual votes of a majority of the people, that would help if we started teaching civics again. And the humanities, in the schools, and a lot of Americans don't go to college, and they don't need to go to college. They shouldn't have to go to college to make a decent living for their families. But in colleges and in the high schools, getting back to teaching, thinking and analysis, and trying to be able to tell right from wrong and fact from fiction, so teaching civics, teaching, the humanities, all that's gotten washed out, and it got washed out by technology. And biologists starting to think of themselves, solely as institutions to teach people how to get a job, right, how to do. And that's important, right? So when your best universities and high schools have become all vocational tech. Essentially, it's all about your job, and not about becoming a thinking citizen who knows history. Turning that around takes time, right?
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah.
Lynn Schmidt: do you have thoughts about rank choice voting?
Mickey Edwards: I do. I think it's a pretty, it's the fad of the moment, the current it's a dumb idea, in my view. So I should explain that, because a lot of the people who are big advocates of RCV get mad at me, for saying this. It does a couple of things. Let's say you have ten people running, or eight, or whatever. Even in a bright state like Missouri, you would probably have a pretty good sense of who you want your number one choice, and a pretty good sense of maybe who would be your second choice, maybe even a third. You get down to fourth and fifth, or whatever. You can't tell them apart. You don't know enough about them. And yet, rank choice voting takes their reassigns, these people upward, dropping a sum and reassigning where they stand in the poll, and then they don't have a runoff. I would feel better about ranking choice voting if they had a two person runoff, so that at the end of the process you have a knowledgeable, people seeing their best choices, people who got the most votes side by side, debating, listening to them and then choosing which one who has to have won a majority of the vote. That's the California system. That's what they do in California, where they don't have these same problems with the extremes, and where they have high turnout, because they have everybody run and everybody can vote in that primary. And at the end of it, you have a two person runoff, just like they did when they elect the President of France. So the rank choice voting system at the end of the process, has you choosing, again, between a number of people where you don't really have a way to have, somebody actually get a majority instead of reassigning it so they get a majority. It's a dumb system, and it's certainly not a democratic system.
Some states allow people to change laws by putting it on the ballot
Lynn Schmidt: you also mentioned in the book ballot initiatives or ballot referendums. Can you speak to that?
Mickey Edwards: some states allow, the people to change, the laws, the rules, the election systems, whatever, by putting it on the ballot, and you just let the people decide. But in most states, you can't do that. You don't have a way around this system, around this party dominated system. So what we have today is, let me put it, political parties do not exist for the purpose of compromise. They do not exist for the purpose of finding some common solution to a problem that we can finally work out among ourselves. They exist to destroy the other guy, right? In Congress, whoever has more votes more members than the other party decides what bills you can even vote on. It's what amendments you can vote on. So we have cut actual majority opinion of the voters out of the picture altogether. And you have two rival clubs, battling and very few ways to get around it. Just like with the closed primaries and the sor loser laws where you cannot take your case directly to the people.
Lynn Schmidt: Yeah, exactly.
Mickey Edwards: If you lost in that closed primary.
Lynn Schmidt: there was a special election in Ohio a few weeks ago, that gave me a little bit of hope. Did that give you some hope as well?
Mickey Edwards: It did. These are rare, though. That's why I'm saying that,
Lynn Schmidt: Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Republican legislature was going to try to make it more difficult for ballot access. Right. Isn't that right? And so that went to a special election and they yeah, yeah.
Mickey Edwards: And no, that was an encouraging result. But it's not happening in enough places. I mean, in Texas, Ken Paxton, who has been using his office for personal aggrandizement as the attorney general ah, they tried to impeach him. Couldn't do it. So reforming the system because people fall in line say, I'm going to stick with my guy, good or bad. And, turning this is a big shift to turn around. It's going to take people thinking differently, and it's going to take the system operating differently. So we, really do have equality.
Lynn Schmidt: Absolutely.
Mickey Edwards' other book is about reclaiming conservatism
Lynn Schmidt: So you wrote another book. Well, you've written more than two books.
Mickey Edwards: I've written a few books, yeah.
Lynn Schmidt: But, the one I'm going to refer to is reclaiming, conservatism how a great American political movement got lost and how it can find its way back. You wrote that book back in 2008, which seems like forever ago. Yes. and I need to ask you, Mickey, as a traditional Reagan conservative, which I also consider myself, a Reagan traditional conservative, although I don't even use that word anymore sometimes because who knows what conservative means? But do you think it's possible to get it back?
Mickey Edwards: I don't know. Boy, lyn I really want to say yes, but, I don't know if it is because today people are not voting on principle.
Lynn Schmidt: right.
Mickey Edwards: They're voting on, just expressing anger. Or they're expressing from the other side of the spectrum. You have to think this way or you're a bad person. You can't speak on our campus unless you already have an opinion that agrees with ours. The conservatism that I grew up with, which was more I don't know, I was more libertarian, I was more like John Locke and James Madison. But, the idea that you would operate out of principle, out of some kind of a principled understanding of the right relationship between people and their government, doesn't seem to really Be what People Are Thinking About These Days. They're thinking much more transactionally. I don't want to wear a mask because I want my freedom. I don't want to have to, meet certain requirements to have a gun because I want my freedom. Or on the other hand, we don't want you to have your freedom to think that way because we're going to tell you how you're supposed to think. Because conservatism traditionally like liberalism. In fact, American conservatism was basically classic European liberalism. Locke and, ideas like that. But I don't know if anybody thinks that way anymore. First of all, that takes a certain kind of education to think that way instead of just reacting to the moment about what you're mad about.
Lynn Schmidt: Right. I guess it was last week vice, President Pence, who's also running for president, gave a speech about populism versus conservatism. And, I go back and forth about whether it's too late, whether we can. I mean, I know what I would choose, but it seems like I am in the minority of the Republican, base right now.
Mickey Edwards: Yeah, I think you are. And I am. You got the two sides because on the one side, it is conservatism versus populism. Right? The other side is liberalism versus progressivism. If you had conservatives and liberals together in Congress or in the state legislatures, you could work it out because you had the same basic, understanding of the purposes and principles of government, and your relationship with your citizens, and what made a good society. But now you have everything driven from the edges. The progressive left is not a majority of the Democratic Party. And the, Trumpian right is not a majority of the Republican Party. But they dominate. They Dominate. And then outside. When you get outside the system into just the general public, you don't really think in those terms. It's like this is my party. I stick with my party. Kirsten Sinema, who is a friend of mine said I am going to be an independent. I'm going to judge every issue on its merits and do what I think is right. She got assailed. She got assaulted. Her, party just attacked her for leaving and saying I'm going to be everybody should be an independent. Everybody should be an independent. Saying I'm going to use my own brain. That's why I was, absolutely. I'm going to stick to the team.
Mickey Edwards: Stop dividing ourselves into teams
Lynn Schmidt: Before we wrap up, is there anything else that we missed in our discussion?
Mickey Edwards: I don't think we missed anything. I think I would say we need for the people to understand that there is something unique about what America is and about the whole idea of America, which was the idea that we are going to be a free people, but who live in a community. And it's not a matter of choosing between the welfare of the community or your rights as an individual, but coming together and trying to blend them so that you're not a person, who shuns what's good for, like refusing to wear a mask when you're in the middle of a pandemic. Or, on the other hand, just shouting down people who disagrees. We've got to get back to saying we don't need an attack on the Trade Towers to make us actually realize that we are one people. We may be black or white. We may be male or female. We may be Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever. We're one nation. Stop dividing ourselves into no. We're Team A or we're Team D or Team F or Q or whatever and just say, we've got to get back to what are those things that unite us? Because right now, we are not a United States.
Lynn Schmidt: No, we are not.
Mickey Edwards: And, I would just hate to live through the time when the United States finally collapses and nations collapse, and I think we may be getting close.
Lynn Schmidt: Well, you put that really well, Mickey, so thank you for that. And thank you, Mickey Edwards, for joining me today. I hope listeners enjoyed this conversation. Conversation. Make sure you subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you won't miss an episode of what keeps you up at night. Again, Mickey Edwards, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mickey Edwards: Oh, thanks. Lynn glad to do it.
