Dan Carlin: America's two-party system was never part of the Founders' design

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If a Martian observed American politics in the 21st century, they’d be forgiven for assuming that the nation’s “two-party system” is codified somewhere in the Constitution. But the Martian would be wrong. The founders, as Dan Carlin notes in this interview, never said a word about the necessity for a constant battle between two parties — nothing about Democrats and Republicans, nothing about the need for any particular number of political factions. That was “not part of the design.”

Carlin often calls himself a “political Martian.” That’s one way of saying that the former reporter and current podcast host tries not to view political issues through the lens of a particular party or tribal affiliation. Instead, he aims for a more objective, long-term view — maybe no surprise if you’ve listened to his podcast Hardcore History , which he launched in 2006 when “podcast” wasn’t yet a household term. Now, everyone has a podcast, but that term still doesn’t quite capture Hardcore History , where Carlin covers momentous historical figures and events through unscripted storytelling in episodes that often break the four-hour mark.

He also takes an unscripted approach in his podcast Common Sense , which for two decades has served as his platform for thinking out loud about American political life — borrowing both its title and a measure of skepticism from Thomas Paine. It’s where he tries to be pragmatic about what American politics has become and how it got there.

Carlin is quick to note he’s no professional historian, but he is one of the nation’s most listened-to storytellers of history, one who’s built a career opting out of both mainstream media and political partisanship. And so we spoke to Carlin about the decades-long expansion of executive power, the two-party system, and the record-high number of Americans who identify as political independents.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kmele Foster: We’re on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and I think many people are wondering, is America coming or going? What is the state of this great experiment we set in motion? On an institutional level, Congress today doesn’t really legislate as it has historically. They barely even pass budgets anymore.

The three branches were designed to work together, or at least be counterbalancing forces. But the legislature isn’t doing nearly as much as it used to or was expected to, the executive branch is doing a heck of a lot more, and the courts are, it seems, still playing their traditional role — trying to adjudicate disputes over what can and can’t be done under the law by the legislative and executive branches. But it’s unclear whether the courts will continue to be able to play that role.

I’m curious about your thoughts on the extent to which this moment is unprecedented or a trend we’ve been on for a while, particularly regarding how executive power is being wielded.

Dan Carlin: What the current president is doing is not breaking down walls. He’s breaking down walls we pretended existed but didn’t — or haven’t for a long time. And this is what we were screaming about on our Common Sense show for years: If you don’t use these powers — for example, Congress’s authority to declare war — at what point do they go away?

I remember seeing it during the second Bush administration. They went to Congress for an authorization for the war in Iraq, but they would say, “We’re coming to you for this authorization, but we are saying explicitly that we don’t think we have to come to you for this authorization.” And Congress was cool with pretending they still needed to do this, but that’s a big fig leaf. Now, when the current president says, “I’m not even going to play that fake game,” and everybody’s in an uproar, what we’re doing is defending the fig leaf of protocol.

The thing to remember about executive power is that it’s tempting to exploit, not just for the executive, but for everyone who wants the same things as the executive. And it’s been a problem on both sides. When you’ve had a trend for decades and decades — some would say going back to Andrew Jackson — that’s going to be a bipartisan thing.

“The founders disliked ‘factions,’ which would have been their word for parties. The system we have now is not part of the design.”

Dan Carlin

To me, the biggest issue is that not enough people pay attention to the fact that the Constitution’s number one goal is not efficient legislating — it is preventing tyranny. We pay a huge price in this country for the inefficiencies in our constitutional design because it’s trying to keep those powers separate and prevent too much power from ending up in any one branch.

Now, the truth of the matter is, if you want to make progress on any number of issues, we’d be better off throwing that out the window. That tyranny-prevention stuff causes us all kinds of headaches, but you see how much it matters when we come close to really needing it.

The Trump administration, for example, would like to pass an agenda that people at the Heritage Foundation have, in one form or another, been pushing for 40 years. The last thing that they want to hear is that Congress needs to interfere more and reestablish guardrails. Liberals would have felt the same way during FDR’s administration when he was trying to pull people out of the Depression, but in ways that increase the tyranny potential, right?

In my view, the problem we have as a country is our inability to understand that we have a two-party system that has developed in a country whose founding documents didn’t design that at all. There’s nothing in the Constitution about Democrats. There’s nothing in there about Republicans. There’s nothing about Whigs. Nothing about Federalists.

The founders disliked “factions,” which would have been their word for parties. What we have now — and what has developed organically over 250 years — is not part of the design.

When you get on the radio and start talking about wanting third-party members or independents to run more, boy, you get a lesson in how hard that is because, over 250 years, the two parties have managed to give themselves something akin to an automatic berth in a basketball tournament. The Democrat and Republican automatically get in — somebody else has to really, really be extraordinary to make it in there.

And that’s wrong. We can’t get better anymore because if you don’t like the Trump administration, then your only alternative is to push the Chuck Schumer side of things.

Foster: What do you think the two-party system selects for?

Carlin: There was a book by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig called Republic, Lost. What Lessig tries to point out is that both of our parties have, over time, become embedded in this system where what gets you promoted up political parties is fundraising.

The people who get to the top positions of power — these are not people who demonstrated fantastic leadership skills. They didn’t demonstrate the ability to work across the aisle. They didn’t demonstrate the ability to come up with really unique, groundbreaking, and interesting legislation. They were fundraisers.

So, when you look at the leadership now, and you say, “Well, why aren’t they pushing harder against the executive branch?” — most of them aren’t those kinds of people. They weren’t picked for those reasons. Those are not their strong points. They may have certain objectives, but they aren’t ideologues. You can see it because they often give up the opportunities to really push what they say they believe in for other things.

If these people really cared about the institution of Congress, or guardrails, or the Constitution, then you would never see the president able to go to war without Congress screaming and yelling. The fact that they don’t is a sign that they don’t want to, right? And they don’t want to because they’ve realized there’s no advantage for them.

“No one’s going to want the guardrails back up when their guy’s in power because it’s counterintuitive.”

Dan Carlin

The founders believed that the various ambitions of people in these different branches of government would counterbalance one another. My pride would counterbalance your pride. But somewhere down the road, people figured out, “I can have all of the perks that matter to me in this job without any of the things that are a pain in the rear for me in this job.” And when that happens, I think you start getting different people [running for office].

I can remember eras in legislative history where competent, experienced legislators left their jobs, saying, “I can’t operate in this environment anymore,” or “Congress has become too divided,” or “Fundraising is too much a part of my job.” Then you end up with people who aren’t leaving because it doesn’t bother them as much as it bothered their predecessor.

Foster: Do you see any realistic path to fixing that problem of incentives or restoring constitutional guardrails?

Carlin: Unless you’re somebody who says, “Elect me, and I’m going to put the guardrails back up,” I don’t know how we fix the fig-leaf-of-protocol problem. No one’s going to want the guardrails back up when their guy’s in power because it’s counterintuitive. If you say, “Elect me, and I’m going to give up some presidential power back to Congress, which may be run by the opposite party, by the way,” who’s going to elect you?

That’s what we get down this road. Can we make things better, or are things going to get worse? We’re required to do some pretty counterintuitive things as an electorate to make things better. Are we capable of doing that?

I don’t want to pretend that multi-party systems are an answer to the question. I think one reason Netanyahu in Israel is so extreme right now is because of the influence of minor parties. So there’s no panacea when it comes to multiple parties. But our duopoly in this country right now is messing with what my stepdad always said was part of the genius of America: We get better through competition. But we’ve got Hertz and Avis here, and there’s no incentive for anyone to be more than 1% better than the next guy. I think that maybe helps explain our political decline as a system.

Foster: Gallup recently found that a record high of 45% of U.S. adults now identify as political independents, yet political division only seems to be getting sharper. In terms of restoring constitutional guardrails or generally easing political polarization, do you see any solutions coming from outside the two-party setup?

Carlin: We’ve gone partisan crazy. The only advantage I can see in multiple parties is it would be harder to fall into one of these two camps.

You mentioned the rise in the number of people who call themselves political independents. I do believe that this is the highest number of political independents we’ve ever had in this country, at least registered, but we have no power. There is no political independent party, and we’re not united on anything. Whereas Democrats may argue amongst themselves, there’s enough agreement so that they’re in the same party. Same for Republicans. Independents span the spectrum from Libertarians to Greens.

We’re inherently divided from the get-go. So independents decide elections now, which I find fascinating, but we have no candidates. Do you see how crazy that is? What does a Trump or whoever’s running for the Democrats — what do they do? Do they appeal to their base, which they have to do, right? What did Nixon say? You run to the right for the primaries, and then you run back to the center for the generals. The Democrats run left for the primaries, then run to the center.

“We’re now at the brittle stage, where solving the problem could destroy the system.”

Dan Carlin

But why are they running to the center at all? Well, they’re running to the center to get people like me. But the radicalness of the times should reflect the level of the problems.

I always use a termite example. If you have somebody come and inspect your house, and they say you have termites, but you just got them, you have a lot of different options — it can cost you just a few bucks if you catch it early. If, however, you find out you’ve had them for 40 years, and they’ve screwed up the structure of your house, then your termite problem requires a radical solution.

By kicking the can down the road for generations like we have — whether we’re talking about race or economics or constitutional guardrails — you’re ignoring the termite problem. The solution that fixes the termite problem is going to have to be more and more structural as we go down the road. If we wanted to solve this problem back in the post-Nixon era, it would have been an easier solve. We’re now at the brittle stage, where solving the problem could be so radical that it could break and destroy the system we’re trying to solve.

We’re unable to figure out what the hell we do. And I think that’s where we see the dearth in leadership here, because we don’t have people running for office promising a solution, right?

Foster: They’re merely promising to keep you from the other guy.

Carlin: Yeah. You have to ask yourself, “Have we created something that breaks our system?” And the answer to that question is unknown. I feel like an observer more than an advocate. I used to know where things were going. I could talk about that intelligently. I feel like I’m just along for the ride now, like all of us are.

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