Victor Wu (Yale) on the real politics of the presidency

Two weeks ago, I argued that Americans should resist the trend towards ever-stronger presidents. Almost as soon as the post went up, I got an email from Victor Wu (Yale Political Science) absolutely STACKED with insightful objections.

In fact, Victor’s emails were so interesting that I invited him to speak with me last Friday. The result was one of my favorite interviews yet.

We talk about:

• how Victor’s time in the Marines influenced his political philosophy

• Victor’s unexpected connection to James C. Scott

• how the role of the president changed from executor to initiator

• the surprise return of Woodrow Wilson to political theory

We also swap a lot of philosophy stories and discover that, unbeknownst to us, we were classmates in 2014.

Hope you enjoy! You can also read the transcript below (lightly cleaned up).

Thanks to Victor for taking the time to come on, and to Jackademic Philosophy, Dénénodji M’Bondjim S., Kari Stark, Karen C-Collector of Books📚🧿♒️, MJR Schneider, and everyone else who tuned in. Let me also shout out all the excellent comments on/critiques of the original post, including from Sol Hando, Kari Stark, Paul S, and Joe Heath himself.¹

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Daniel (00:00:00):

I’m talking to Victor Wu from Yale political science. He’s a PhD student writing about fascinating foundational issues in politics.

And Victor, I thought I’d just start with a little bit about you in background, and we’ll kind of work our way up to where you and I got started on our conversation about the presidency and where you think legislative predominance comes from and so on.

But first, where do you come from? Can you just tell me a little bit about your interests in political science and how they got sparked?

Victor (00:00:35):

I grew up in Connecticut—Durham, Connecticut. It’s a small, historically farming town, about 7,000 people, 30 minute drive from New Haven. My parents are immigrants from China. They moved to the U.S. in 1991. Pretty much they were the first wave of students out after June 1989. I was born in Pittsburgh in 1994. We moved to Durham when I was four, and I grew up there ever since. A fun biographical tidbit we can talk about a little bit later, I eventually learned that I lived basically like a five minute walk away from James Scott’s house, his farm in Durham. I went to high school at Xavier High School, an all-boys Catholic school in the area in Middletown, then went to undergrad at Harvard starting fall of 2012.

I got interested in philosophy in high school via Catholic theology. I came into college with two somewhat-in-tension interests that I was trying to reconcile, one of which was philosophy and the second of which was, I wanted to be a famous startup founder. I was super interested in high school reading in particular Paul Graham’s essays. I thought he was an amazing writer, I was really inspired, he was the co-founder of Y Combinator and Sam Altman’s mentor and he was a philosophy major too, and a lot of people in this kind of space like Paul, Reid Hoffman, etc., they all studied philosophy and they found it formative for one reason or another. That was what I was interested in going in, so I spent the first year of college mostly taking math and CS classes, but then I realized I sucked at them, and also was not very interested in either. My parents, both of them moved to the U.S. to study chemistry but both switched to CS and my dad is a data scientist and my mom’s a software engineer now and my sister also studied CS in undergrad, so I’m the only non-CS person in the family.

I got interested in political philosophy as a freshman in spring of 2013—it was very random path. I took a freshman seminar with the biologist Doug Melton that was called “Big Ideas”, and it was like every week you learn one big idea from a different field, and the week we did philosophy was the Rawls-Nozick debate. And so that was my first exposure to Rawls and Nozick, especially the little bits we read were Rawls on natural lottery and Nozick on desert and entitlement. I read that and was like, oh my God, this is like what I wanted to do all along. I had a strong interest in politics growing up, volunteered for local state rep campaigns, things like that, read the news very frequently. This seemed like exactly the level of abstraction that I was interested in, debating principles, ethics, how we ought to structure our political lives and institutions. Then I basically spent the next few years, especially the junior and senior year, basically just immersed in contemporary moral and political philosophy—so essentially “Rawls studies”. I practically read every debate, every dialectic, every move, so that I was immersed in that. I found it really fascinating, so I planned to continue to study, to apply to philosophy PhD programs, to work for a few years and then apply.

I graduated in 2016, though, so pretty much my entire adult life has been in the shadow of Trump. My senior year of college was just constantly discourse about Trump, about the clash between rural and urban America, between liberal conservative America, between “real America” and the coastal, liberal elite “bubbles”, and so that had a big influence on me. And then around the same time, also in college William Deresiewicz, whose essays I’d also read as a high school student, in 2014 published a book called Excellent Sheep, which is a critique of elite higher education, saying basically students come in and just follow whatever career treadmill that they were put on to go to consulting or banking or now tech. So that had a big impact on me too, so I was fishing around for something to do, to get a life experience that was outside of that world, but that also would put me in contact with a broader cross-section of American society. I mean growing up in Durham, obviously it’s a small town so it’s relatively conservative, but certainly Cambridge, Massachusetts is the opposite. So I basically stumbled on the military as an option, and I can talk more about that, but I already said enough just in response to that very first question.

Daniel (00:05:46):

No, that’s great. Don’t worry—I’m not expecting to get the lion’s share of the airtime here. So I wanted to ask, while we’re still warming up, about this James Scott connection. Could you tell me a bit more about that?

Victor (00:06:01):

Yeah, so I actually somehow had no idea who he was until after I graduated college.

Daniel (00:06:07):

Just to put it on the record, who is James C. Scott?

Victor (00:06:12):

He’s a very famous political scientist, anthropologist, specialist in Southeast Asia, but his most famous work, and one that I’ve seen any number of people reference well outside political science, is a book called Seeing Like a State, the subtitle is something like how [certain] schemes to improve the human condition have failed. It has a really memorable opening talking about forestry techniques in Germany in the [18th] century or something like that, but basically the argument is that—the central, organizing metaphor is sight, so what does a state need to see? And so the key concept that gets developed and extracted is “legibility”, the idea being that states need to make reality into kind of uniform categories in order to “see” reality, and so it’s a of critique of what he calls “high modernism”, of course communism being the paradigmatic example, but it’s far from the only one that he developed.

And so Scott, he’s an anarchist, he’s an anti-state, left intellectual, and his personal political commitments are very closely tied with this scholarship in ways that don’t detract from it, that actually amplify and complement it. Also part of his formation, his background, is the fact that he studies agrarian societies and he personally described himself as a “mediocre farmer”. He had a farm in Durham, which is historically a farming community, and so I basically learned who he was and then also that he lived like five minutes away from me in 2017, so the year after I graduated and so I read Seeing Like a State and was blown away, and then I started Googling him saw a New York Times article about him and the location was Durham, Connecticut.

I thought, I have to reach out to this guy. So I just cold emailed him, and was like “hey I also live in your town and I love your book, can we meet up?” And he was super, super generous. I actually remember to the date, because it was January 4, 2018 I went to his farm, this was the day before I left for Marine Officer Candidate School. I went to his farm, had coffee and cake, and he gave me a signed copy of a relatively new book at the time, a signed copy of Against the Grain. [Retrieves book from shelf.] I can show you the inscription...and the funny thing is this is the first time we’d ever met, so he didn’t really know me. And so he wrote, “Hope you become an intellectual of some kind.” [Holding up book inscription.]

Daniel (00:09:10):

That has to be somewhere in your bio, “Victor Wu, renowned intellectual of some kind, we’re all hoping he goes off and does well.” I also didn’t know that James Scott’s signature was just a J—what a flex.

Victor (00:09:28):

Oh yeah, it is largely illegible, if I didn’t know…[Holding up book inscription again.]

Daniel (00:09:33):

Oh there’s more to it! It’s like a J and then a dip—that’s a guy that signs a lot of tomes.

Victor (00:09:39):

Yes, and so the sad thing is, I left for the Marines, I was in the Marines from 2018 to 2022. And then I was in China doing a post-grad fellowship, the Yenching Scholarship, in Beijing from 2022 to 2024. And I started at Yale in fall of 2024, and obviously he was a Yale emeritus professor. So I emailed him and was like, hey Jim, I’m coming back to Connecticut, would love to catch up again. And he was like, “Oh great, let’s meet up.” But then he died a few weeks before I started. And so this was the only time I ever met him.

Daniel (00:10:16):

Wow, I mean it’s a nice example of why you should not pass up on opportunities to reach out and meet your heroes if you can. I’m a big opponent of the “never meet your heroes” slogan.

Victor (00:10:30):

Yes, I mean, I came to Yale to work with some other intellectual heroes. I got super interested in Ian Shapiro’s and Hélène Landemore’s work while I was in the Marines.

Daniel (00:10:42):

In the Marines?

Victor (00:10:44):

Yeah, so I’d never read these people in college because I was doing Rawls studies, right? Basically the Marines was the intellectual pivot point, where I really got interested. The first and only political science class I took in undergrad, I took fall 2015 as a senior for a gen ed requirement, which was “The Making of Modern Politics: The Development of Democracy in Europe” with Peter Hall, which actually turned out to be my favorite class of all of undergrad. But at the time I didn’t really have the background knowledge to know how to situate it. But after when I was in the Marines I started reading a ton of IR, military history, organizational theory, leadership and management literature, so it got me super interested in the social sciences. And so political theory, and political science more broadly, I just came to feel, oh that’s the natural place to do this.

Victor (00:11:41):

So I started looking around for people in political science departments who we’re doing work that seemed amenable to my interests, and I basically realized Yale is the place to do this, a kind of realist, institutionalist political theory as political science way of doing normative theory, right. So it’s not just descriptive, it’s not just explanatory, although it involves both of those, but it’s foundationally still thinking normatively about what is democracy and what it ought to be.

Daniel (00:12:12):

How did your experience in the Marines affect the way you think about politics and political science?

Victor (00:12:19):

Yeah so it’s very indirect, and another thing to talk about a little bit more is after college I also stumbled upon Proust. The key narrative element there is that a life only becomes intelligible in retrospect.

At the time, it was just like, I’m a lieutenant in this unit—I was an artillery officer, so I spent nine months in the Quantico area, six months training in Oklahoma, and then I was stationed in Hawaii for three years—and so I get to my unit and they’re just day-to-day practical challenges where it’s very helpful to know things about organizational theory and sociology and management, right? I started reading about military history, IR, China. I just started reading it naturally because I felt, oh, this is obviously relevant for me. And the subset of that literature that I found most interesting and most lasting, was the more theoretical wing of it, although obviously like the practical How to be a Manager, Turn the Ship Around! types, a lot of it was very practically useful. Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior was the big one. [Retrieves book from shelf.] It had a huge impact on me in this time. It’s a very theoretical book, it’s analytic, theoretical, conceptual, rigorous in a way that an analytic philosopher would appreciate, but it’s about the real world, you could say: it’s about organizations, about institutions. And so that combination just came to seem perfect. Basically, I started reading stuff like this and it inspired me to go back to the real classics like Weber, and then eventually Woodrow Wilson, and people in this late 19th, early 20th century moment, which is what I would claim right now is the pivotal moment in which modern democracy came into being.

Daniel (00:14:30):

Perfect chance to pivot to democracy. So let’s talk a little bit about how you see democracy. Why was that such a pivotal time?

Victor (00:14:41):

This is easing into both the thoughts I had about your piece and also just the broader project and the ambition more generally. So the very, very sweeping story—obviously you can get into the details, but essentially the foundational conceptual distinction on which modern political theory and the institutional design of representative government across the transatlantic world, was the legislation-execution distinction, and institutionalized formally as a system in which the assumption was that legislatures legislate and executives execute. Most canonically this conceptual distinction was theorized by Locke in the Second Treatise which is your opening epigraph for the “Abolish the Presidency” piece, and those conceptual distinctions, this kind of isomorphism between the concept or philosophy and the institutional design, organizes basically political thought of representative government from Locke through the 1850s. So the Federalists, Montesquieu, classical parliamentary theorists like Constant, Guizot, they’re all working within this fundamental framework, even though they have different models within this overarching theoretical apparatus.

But essentially, the story of modern democracy is, I would argue, the story of the rise of the democratic executive. This happens in the U.S. relatively early, it happens across Europe in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, you could roughly say. And the fundamental implication, the consequence, of the rise of the democratic executive is the collapse of the legislation-execution distinction in practice. And so the story of this era is political thinkers from across the political spectrum—early observers like James Bryce, Moisei Ostrogorski, Carl Schmitt, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Max Weber, and Woodrow Wilson most importantly for my project—they’re all basically looking for ways to re-theorize how politics actually functions, given that we all see that it’s no longer the case that executives are merely executors of the laws. They’re actually, in fact, the ones who are initiating political proposals, policy proposals, the ones who are winning popular mandates for those proposals and pushing them through the legislature via the vehicle of the party.

The first distinction that was proposed to replace legislation-execution was the politics-administration distinction. The most famous theorists of the politics-administration are Woodrow Wilson, i.e. early Wilson in his 1887 article, “The Study of Administration”, and the later Max Weber, especially his writings on bureaucracy. So the problem though with the politics administration distinction—and this has basically been the dialectic for 100 plus years of this literature—the basic problem is that it implies, wrongly, that administration is not political. And so that’s the dichotomy to which people say, oh what about this, what about that. But the problem is that to genuinely move beyond a conceptual scaffolding that you know is inadequate—to move beyond a paradigm—you have to you can’t just point out anomalies, you have to actually replace it with something constructive, and something that is widely perceived to be better. So essentially my claim is that Wilson in his mature work did in fact come up with a better replacement. Weber, I would argue, towards the very end of his life in his work, for example in the 1919 “Politics as a Vocation” lecture, was in fact moving closer towards Wilson’s position.

And Weber and Wilson, by the way, they’re sometimes put together in the public administration literature, but they’re often talked about very separately. But I think of them—and this era in general—as part of a transatlantic progressive movement, and methodologically what I would call them is this is the transatlantic tradition of institutional realism. People like the historian James Kloppenberg and sociologists like Lawrence Scaff have also pointed out this connection, like Kloppenberg says, basically—obviously it’s a little bit simplified—that Weber is basically a progressive in all but mood. Weber’s a pessimist, whereas the American progressives were relatively optimistic.

What makes Wilson so pivotal, though—and this is a hot take, but I think it’s very very defensible, and this will be one of the central history of political thought claims of this project—is that Wilson was the most important political theorist of the 20th century, certainly the most important democratic theorist. And the reason for that is what Wilson in his mature work, the 1908 book Constitutional Government in the United States, proposed to replace both the legislation-execution distinction and the politics-administration distinction, which is what I call, drawing on his own words, the initiative-critique distinction. So the flagship theoretical claim is basically that the real logic of modern democracy, after the era of mass democracy, of political parties, of the modern executive and administrative apparatus, is not legislative legislation versus executive execution. It’s executive initiative versus legislative critique. And so that’s the conceptual distinction that I’m saying should replace both legislation-execution and politics-administration.

Daniel (00:20:44):

Okay, I just want to make sure I follow that, then we’ll get into Wilson the theorist and the historical figure, very unlikely pick but I’m fascinated by the way you think, and I feel like you’re going to make a fascinating case. So the legislative-executive distinction that we see in Locke—am I right that’s the legislative is supposed to make the law? They determine what the law is, they pass the laws, they have the mandate from the people, and then the executive is just sort of the big errand boy-in-chief. Is that accurate, or is there more to it?

Victor (00:21:25):

Yes, that in a nutshell is what I am kind of broadly calling the “legislative paradigm”, as an abstraction that captures from Locke, through Montesquieu, through the Federalists, through Constant, etc. That is the kind of organizing assumption and conceptual distinction that they’re all working with.

Daniel (00:21:47):

Okay, and then there’s the politics-administration distinction. Can you explain a little bit more how that maps onto the legislature versus the executive, the separation of powers issue?

Victor (00:22:04):

Yeah. So the politics-administration distinction, which arises in this late 19th early 20th century moment, was basically the first attempt to replace legislation-execution, and politics, being a more broad abstract term which encompasses both legislation and execution, and so then what used to be called “execution” gets reconceptualized as administration.

Victor (00:22:32):

But yes to your earlier point, it’s exactly right. If you read the Federalist Papers, even Hamilton, who is standardly read as the premier theorist of executive power and the energetic executive, in the Federalist Papers, he calls the president a “Chief Magistrate”. There’s never any indication that the any of the Federalists—any of Madison, Hamilton, etc.—none of them think about the president as a democratic leader. And in fact that’s precisely what they didn’t want: they wanted the President to be the Chief Magistrate because they thought that the legislature was the proper site of democratic representation, or at least the “privileged” site, using my quasi-technical terminology. They thought that the legislature had a privileged claim to represent the people.

Daniel (00:23:21):

Okay, and then that starts to fall apart and so there needs to be some conceptual recognition that the executive is doing politics, not just overseeing things. And that’s where we get the politics versus administration distinction. And then your point is that executive-initiative somehow develops over this time as an important feature in politics, and Wilson’s the first, in your reading, to put this analytically front and center, like the executive has agency, the executive can ram stuff through Congress in the U.S., the executive can build support, the executive might have—well, you tell me, equal mandate, or maybe even in some cases stronger mandate from the people than the Congress? How do you think about that?

Victor (00:24:13):

That, I think, becomes the central dialectic of genuinely modern democracy, which is the competing democratic representation claims of the executive and the legislature.

Daniel (00:24:25):

I see, so originally there wasn’t even a contest, it was just the privileged site was the legislature, and then in the 20th century it changes.

Victor (00:24:33):

At least, in theory. In practice, obviously in the U.S. the founding design was in some fundamental senses obsolete within a generation, but the U.S. is kind of the first early case—Andrew Jackson being the paradigmatic early figure—but so in the 19th century, Jackson and Lincoln, they’re exceptions rather than the rule, right—and so that so someone just commented the logic of the three branches was destroyed by the party system. The essence of my claim is that it was not in fact “destroyed”, but it was reconfigured and has to be re-theorized as a different functional separation of powers. So if you think that what the separation of powers is, is legislation versus execution, then yeah you might think it was destroyed, you might read Wilson as destroying or undermining the separation of powers, but I’m saying he actually fundamentally re-theorized it, and I think re-theorized it on more solid descriptive and normative grounds.

Daniel (00:25:33):

So let’s talk about both the descriptive and normative grounds. Why do you think that descriptively what’s going on is that the executive has initiative and then the legislature critiques? And then we’ll go from there to “Why might that be a good thing?”

Victor (00:25:50):

So the other thing I should say is, even within the classical legislative paradigm, initiative always exists. And actually the most fundamental philosophical claim of this project is that, conceptually, initiative not legislation is the first act of politics, and in an event of politics, initiative is the first act, so legislation really should be re-conceptualized as the codification of a two-part act of initiative and critique. But so even within the legislative paradigm, within classical parliamentarism, within the American Founding Congress, there were bearers of initiative, and structurally speaking, due to the very familiar analytics of the collective action problem, which Jane Mansbridge for example says that the analysis of the collective action problem, in her APSA presidential address from a decade or so ago, was an analytical advance comparable to the development of the laws of supply and demand in economics. So that’s foundational to how I think about politics.

Even within Congress—Congress is famously in American politics a “they, not an it”—so it’s not the case that Congress qua Congress is somehow acting, right? It’s individuals, it’s the caucus leaders, committee chairs, especially. This is Wilson’s first book, which is his dissertation, written when he was like 25 or something. It’s mind-blowing. Really, really precocious. His first book from 1885 called Congressional Government is basically operating within the legislative paradigm and he’s critiquing it, though. He’s saying, what congressional government really is is committee government it’s rule by individual committee chairs, who in smoke-filled back rooms trade favors, suck up to party bosses, logroll, and they produce this incoherent, special interest-filled “legislation”, and it doesn’t really track any sense of popular will, and there’s no accountability to the people. Wilson’s writing in the 1880s, but he’s drawing on American history from the Founding up to that point. And so it’s not the case that initiative came into being in this era, but the argument is historically, for structural reasons which are enduring, political initiative migrated from the legislature to executives with democratic authority, to national democratic representatives who win their mandate in part via leadership of their party and enact their mandate via the party in the legislature.

Daniel (00:29:04):

Sorry, I was just distracted for a moment by the solution [a post in the comments] to replace both parties with the “Jack party” and then get rid of term limits and appoint Jack as supreme leader. I don’t think Wilson wrote anything about that, but I say he has no objection.

Victor (00:29:19):

That is a big iff true.

Daniel (00:29:25):

Okay I’ve got so many questions to go on from here. One question I have for you is, how do you think about Wilson as a figure to draw on? Because somewhat infamously, right, his reputation has gone up and down over the years. And his quite noxious racist attitudes I think have caused him to take a bit of a hit reputationally, and some would argue reasonably so. But at the same time, he’s this important American president, and he pushed for the League of Nations and so on. So how do you feel about drawing inspiration from a complicated, morally gray guy like that?

Victor (00:30:15):

That’s part of what makes this project kind of necessarily provocative. So I will say that, yeah, Wilson’s a very complicated figure, and I would say his reputation has dramatically declined really only within the last few years—this is a recent development, as you’re saying. He got canceled in 2020; the right hates him. If you pick any given Claremont Review article, and they’ll be talking about how Woodrow Wilson was the start of the fall of America. And more careful arguments that are made by serious scholars in this tradition like Ronald Pestritto or Charles Kesler, and even more moderate versions still from people like James Ceaser, Harvey Mansfield, Jeffrey Tulis—they all recognize that Wilson is a really pivotal figure.

I should also say, I was just pulling it up, there is I think starting to be some pushback, so David Frum in The Atlantic back in 2024 published an “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson” piece, in which he was saying that for most of the 20th century, Wilson was regarded as the fourth best president, lagging behind only Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And yeah, I think Wilson is a really, truly distinctive figure because he was not only a political actor, he was the only president with a PhD, and also not even that, he was one of the first Americans period to ever receive a PhD.

So he integrates theory and practice in a way that you don’t see elsewhere. Teddy Roosevelt was was frequently mentioned as a paradigmatic example—across the transatlantic world, so Max Weber mentioned it, James Bryce mentioned it—everybody was like “Teddy Roosevelt is distinctive”, the term they tended to use was “plebiscitarian” executive, but Wilson is the theorist, but also I would say he departs from that line. So Wilson is not properly interpreted either theoretically or just historically at the level of fact as a “plebiscitarian”. So in the scholarship that I’m really building on, people like John Cooper or Daniel Stid, Wilson led via the party, he was a party leader—oh also Clinton Rossiter—they describe him as a “prime ministerial” president, and he I think at least certainly in his first term—World War I was kind of a different beast—but certainly in his first term domestically, he led precisely via this model. He exemplified the executive initiative versus legislative critique division of labor that he himself theorized.

But the important aspects, the point about the issues on race and imperialism, I’d say those can’t be ignored though. That’s a substrate throughout American political thought about executive power from Hamilton on. Hamilton in the Federalist Papers openly says we want the U.S. to be an empire, so he positively uses the word “empire”. Through Wilson, through arguably to the present day with Trump etc., imperialism, external power, foreign power—it can’t be separated, at least historically. The challenge then for this project and where I’m moving beyond Wilson in a couple key ways, one of which is I’m extracting the initiative-critique distinction, which I think is independent and can readily be extracted from Wilson’s personal views.

And then I’m also generalizing. So Wilson is mainly writing about America, the book is literally Constitutional Government in the United States. He’s drawing on the transatlantic tradition, he’s drawing on British thinkers, German thinkers, American thinkers, whereas I am generalizing. Generalization is not a trivial task, right, so going from n of 1 to potentially indefinite n. So that’s what I see as the core of the constructive Part II of this project.

Daniel (00:34:55):

Oh, man, this is super interesting. Can I just ask you how you think about executive initiative changing since Wilson’s time? I mean, you’re welcome to just zip ahead to the present, but if you think there were some important stops along the way, by all means.

Victor (00:35:13):

I think the pivotal era of history in which you get the rise of genuinely modern democracy is certainly this late 19th, early 20th century. But obviously a lot of things affected politics in the U.S. and outside since then. I should also say that just to scope and discipline the empirical cases, so like in descending order of priority, basically my focus is the U.S., particularly the Founding era, Progressive era, and today, and then the UK, particularly the 19th and early 20th century, and then Germany especially Imperial and Weimar—so also again, late 19th early, 20th century—and then France, as kind of a contrast shadow case, in which there’s a oscillation, I think unstably and I think I would say normatively unattractively, between executive plebiscitarianism, i.e. the Napoleons, de Gaulle, arguably today, and legislative restorationism, right so that’s how I would interpret, say, the French Third Republic. But yeah so those are the four cases, but I think the theory generalizes. I was talking with Chandran Kukathas over email a couple days ago, and he was saying, oh what about Australia, there’s a discourse in Australia about the rise of the PM, things like that. So I think it’ll be it’ll be very useful, as this is exactly the direction I need to be pushed in. I have this theoretical framework, now what’s the goodness of fit with empirical reality?

So I would say that one key thing in the U.S. case, just to answer your question a little bit, is the rise of the primary system. This is a big part of James Ceaser’s Presidential Selection, his canonical book about the American presidency in American political development and political thought. He—I think rightly, generally—sees the primary system as introducing various pathologies, although I would say Ceaser I think wrongly reads Wilson both theoretically and historically as a plebiscitarian. But he is right about the primary system, which developed in fragments over the course of this era. So in the Progressive era, a couple states used it, but it basically became universalized in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party where the 1972 adoption of the McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms was the pivot point, in which it decided we’re going to adopt this uniformly. One problem with the primary system—this is where my analysis differs from Ceaser’s—is I think the main problem with the primary system is not for executive selection, it’s actually for legislative selection.

The key problem with the primary system, especially in one-party dominant states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, or California, is that it basically makes the decisive election the primary, the Democratic primary, and you can generalize this to Republican states too. And the who votes in primaries? It’s 5% of the electorate, oftentimes more ideologically extreme or political insiders. And so by the time you get to the general election, the choice is already predetermined, right? And so it’s not legible because if you are like one of the 5% of people who vote in the primary, you see a ballot with like seven Democrats, it’s like I don’t know any of these people, there’s no reason that like a state senate candidate should have very widespread name recognition. So these seven people, you have no idea who they are, you vote for one randomly, maybe if you’ve vaguely heard of them from a sign, and then that person wins a plurality 15-20% of the vote, and then cruises to election and basically is an incumbent with a safe seat. And so their main challenge is being primaried. And so that, I think, is at the level of legislative incentives and selection is a key, possibly the key, driver of why in the U.S. today we lack robust legislative critique.

Daniel (00:39:26):

The primary system, specifically for Congress, you think. So is it the rise of safe seats in particular? Because this is really important in the news right now with the latest Supreme Court decision, where it looks like there could be even more safe seats coming soon.

Victor (00:39:44):

Yes, yes. So certainly the ambition of this project is to go all the way from the level of conceptual foundation to institutional design to present day, 2026, 2028, 2032 reform recommendations about what’s the problem, and therefore what changes would ameliorate that problem.

My partner, John Griffin, who works with an organization called Partners in Democracy, founded by Danielle Allen, a Harvard political theorist.

Daniel (00:40:17):

Oh yeah, she’s awesome.

Victor (00:40:19):

Yes, yes. He’s recently posted, if you want to check it out, on their Substack called The Renovator. He recently published a summary of the ballot campaign and the kind of rationale for it that they’re spearheading in Massachusetts right now for the ballot in November, which is going under the name “All-Party Primaries”.

Daniel (00:40:45):

Yes, so someone actually asked about this in the chat. A Capsaicin Substance Abuser said, on your page you restacked this post in support of All-Party Primaries in Massachusetts. The “Abuser” continued, I live in MA and a friend of mine who’s a policy leader for progressive state level org is vehemently against this, but he’s thinking we should try it. So yeah I was going to come back and ask your thoughts about this Massachusetts All-Party Primary issue, so great, please go ahead.

Victor (00:41:18):

Essentially this reform is a combination of two familiar electoral reforms, combined into an unprecedented electoral system. So it’s Top Two primary elections plus fusion voting. We see fusion voting for example New York City has it, we see Top Two for example California has it.

Daniel (00:41:44):

Can we just break each of those down, real quick?

Victor (00:41:46):

Yes, so Top Two or—yeah I just saw the comment [about Daniel being “bookshelf-mogged”]...

Daniel (00:41:52):

I’m moving, I’m moving! All my books are in boxes. Look at this, I’ve got a whole stack with Schelling and all this stuff that’s on the floor. Schelling and Black Power and actually there’s a book that I just got from a colleague, it’s called A Fate Worse Than Hell, about prisons in the Civil War, highly recommended. That’s my attempt to “unbookmog” myself, and I don’t think it worked, please continue.

Victor (00:42:23):

Yeah so really briefly, Top Two, it’s an open non-partisan primary, and the top two vote-getters move on to the general election. So in California they’re about to do a Top Two primary election for governor. Fusion, there are kind of different varieties of fusion, so the version in Massachusetts that they’re going to do is basically one in which—so one version of fusion, which is “disaggregated”, is when you show up multiple times on the ballot under different party lines, so you’re Zohran Mamdani, Democrat, Zohran Mamdani, Working Family Party, etc. In the Massachusetts version, though, all of those get put into one ballot line, so it just says—I won’t name names because that might cause some controversy—so-and-so candidate, Abundance Democrat, versus so-and-so candidate, DSA Democrat, and so it’ll say Democrat and then right under it Abundance and then right under it Forward Party or something like that, and so you can kind of stack basically endorsements, endorsements from sub-party organizations or potentially organized groups.

And so essentially, this is a theory about how this would work based on incentive analysis, based on very credible political science, but it’s extrapolating because there’s no empirical data to test, because this doesn’t exist yet. But the theory is that in a one-party dominant state like Massachusetts, most elections will end up such that the top two vote-getters in the primary will be Democrats. And so you’ll get the general election and then these Democrats now have a way to differentiate themselves, so it’s not just random no-face Democrat versus random no-face Democrat, it’s the Abundance Democrat versus the Green Democrat or the DSA Democrat versus the Working Families Democrat or however you want to iterate. It doesn’t necessarily need to be uniform at each level of government, each municipality might have different configurations. But so basically it’s the theory of party cues. So when voters vote, the most informative thing they vote based on is party label, other than individual name recognition, they vote on party label.

And so essentially this is a now a sub-party label that gets put right on the ballot, and so for voters it makes the differences between candidates much more legible, going back to James Scott’s term of legibility, it makes the electoral composition much more legible. It makes it general because it’s moving the decisive election from the primary to the general election with the broader electorate. And it’s a way of promoting, enforcing, improving accountability. Now if you’re the candidate of the Forward Party or the candidate of Abundance, and you’ve agreed to let Abundance endorse you and basically put that on the ballot, now you’re tied to that programmatic commitment of what Abundance stands for. So it improves programmatic politics, which is standardly seen as a good thing rather than insider, personalistic, etc. competition.

Daniel (00:45:49):

Exactly. I was just wondering about this because when you have multiple candidates from the same party running in the same district, there’s a question of how they’re going to differentiate themselves, and one of the case studies that stuck with me from Shapiro and Rosenbluth’s book Responsible Parties is Japan. So in Japan, it’s common to have multiple people from the same leading party running in the same district. How do they differentiate themselves? Favors, right? I mean they have clientelism. So there’s a person, a local business or something or a major company that has does business in the area, that you’ll a relationship with and that’s how you get people from the Diet taken to the onsen and stuff like this.

It’s not something that I put front and center at all in my little Substack post on the presidency, but that’s actually something that really does worry me about not just the president but politics in general. Certainly in the U.S. right now, with the executive very powerful, it’s very striking how unprogrammatic our politics is. And I don’t just mean that people will run on one program and then pivot and do something else, though that’s also an issue. I just mean that like there’s a lot of “I will take care of you” personalistic, clientelistic promises being made. And not even that, just improvisation by people in power—and I suppose I was trying to signal at this with the the list of what I saw as corrupt pardons coming from Trump, but it’s also not just limited to Trump: there’s the Marc Rich case for Clinton, Biden pardons his whole family, and it goes on and on and on.

So I wanted to put an underline beneath your excellent point about the importance of programmatic politics. So just, conceptually, is a way to think about this fusion voting plus Top Two, is the thought that when parties can’t differentiate the candidates, there has to be some way other than the difference in person to differentiate the candidates, so let’s let them run if not exactly a party a kind of sub-party group, and almost recreate party politics at that primary level?

Victor (00:48:17):

Yeah so it’s not just at the primary level, it’s inclusive of the both the primary and the general election.

Daniel (00:48:21):

Okay so not limited to the primary level, okay got it.

Victor (00:48:26):

Yeah so you’re exactly right though. I would say—I mean obviously Ian Shapiro is my chair, and he’s also prominently displayed in your “Abolish the Presidency” piece right at the start.

Daniel (00:48:39):

Sorry, Ian, if he doesn’t like that piece! But that story stuck with me so much, I love Ian so much.

Victor (00:48:46):

Yes, I mean basically the combination of provocative headline argument, the Locke Second Treatise quote, and then the picture of my advisor as the first thing, I was like “oh God I have I have to reply to this.” The “mysterious egg” by the way—ironically this is hearsay, I haven’t actually personally asked Ian about that—I think it’s an ostrich egg.

Daniel (00:49:13):

I also had this belief, I don’t know where it came from. So there’s this great philosopher, formerly at Princeton, the late Gil Harman, who has all this wonderful stuff about managing your beliefs and so on. Whereas most epistemologists are thinking it’s so important to have airtight arguments for everything you believe, Harman’s like: stop wasting your time, delete all the clutter from your mind! And so in honor of Gil Harman, I, too, believe that it’s an ostrich egg. I have deleted from my mind any possible explanation of how I got to know that information.

By the way, we’re referring to this picture, there’s a picture of Ian Shapiro in this post of mine from last week, “Abolish the Presidency”, later named something a little bit less offensive, with Ian Shapiro, Yale political scientist and political theorist—actually I’d love to just talk a bit more about other figures in political theory with you in a second—but it’s him, looking at the camera next to an apparently ostrich egg, and it’s just spellbinding. I have no bird-related anything that I pose next to but there’s something powerful about it the plumage, the eggs, anything like that, it sends a message that you’re a bringer of life I don’t know.

Victor (00:50:36):

I was—again hearsay told—I really should have confirmed this with Ian before this, but I was told it’s an ostrich egg because his family and/or parents were ostrich farmers in South Africa, he’s from South Africa. But I’m actually just gonna pull up his page so if anybody wants to just quickly access to this egg picture they can they can take a look.

Daniel (00:51:02):

This is the kind of content that you can expect in a livestream, high quality ostrich lore.

Victor (00:51:10):

I read a bunch of Harman’s papers in Selim Berker’s metaethics class back in fall 2014.

Daniel (00:51:14):

Wait a minute, were we in that class together?

Victor (00:51:20):

At Harvard?

Daniel (00:51:21):

We would have been in that class together!

Victor (00:51:23):

Oh my God, really!

Daniel (00:51:25):

Wait that’s crazy you were in Selim’s metaethics class in 2014! I mean, oh my God, so this is a mixed graduate undergraduate course with Selim Berker, who is my pick for the greatest in terms of firepower, greatest living philosopher.

Victor (00:51:39):

Yes, that’s what I, having drifted at this point decisively out of the philosophy world, I have not kept up, but certainly when I was an undergrad, the talk in the department was like, oh, who do you need to take class with? It’s like, Selim Berker, that’s the guy. At the time I think he was an associate professor. He later inherited Scanlon’s chair.

Daniel (00:52:00):

He would have been an assistant at the time. He went up for tenure later.

Victor (00:52:05):

Oh yeah. And so Scanlon by the way, also one of my undergrad professors. I graduated in spring 2016, the year he retired, so I was one of his final students.

Daniel (00:52:20):

Okay, wait, can we just talk a little bit about some people that we know? So Scanlon’s an interesting guy. Tim Scanlon, probably best known in America now for being the guy who wrote the book in The Good Place. In The Good Place, the book What We Owe to Each Other, which is an infinitely ripoff-able title—I’ve ripped it off.

Victor (00:52:42):

Yeah, What We Owe to Ourselves!

Daniel (00:52:44):

That’s right, take that Tim! So he was at Harvard for a long time, before that at Princeton. He’s got this theory of ethics called “contractualism” and What We Owe to Each Other is kind of the like flagship statement of it, but there’s also a really, really good early paper from the 70s “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” that, if you’re interested, I actually would recommend reading instead if you are new to this stuff, it’s so short and it’s so just non-stop good. But Scanlon, what was he like to work with? Because he’s a philosopher, I mean I think he has a background in math if I’m not mistaken, but he’s a true ethics philosopher, he’s like an analytic philosopher who is like, a reason for x in circumstance c to phi for reasons R, it’s like that level of abstraction. Given your proclivities and your thinking, institutionalist thinking, what was that like working with Scanlon?

Victor (00:53:51):

Yeah so I should say, I have never given up you could say the analytic philosopher’s way of thinking. So the first paper in this research pipeline, which is on the Federalist Papers, is a reading of the Federalist Papers as literally a logical syllogism, and so that’s the “Founding Logic of Legislative Predominance”, for which the conclusion of the syllogism is a descriptive assumption of legislative predominance, which we can talk about a little bit later.

Just circling to this biographical point real quick, yeah it was mind-blowing, right? If you’re a freshman with a kind of background interest in philosophy, and then you get to Harvard and you find out about Rawls and Nozick, and then it’s like oh turns out that all of his best students are in the department, you can bump into them in the hallway and take classes with them. I unfortunately never got to take a chance to take class with Christine Korsgaard, and with Scanlon it was kind of a weird ships passing in the night. I found out about his, he taught an advanced undergrad lecture class on contemporary political philosophy which was Rawls, Nozick, Cohen, Susan Okin, etc. I found out about it too late to take it, and then I studied abroad at Jesus College, Cambridge for nine months in my junior year, so I missed the next iteration of it.

And so I only the first time I actually even encountered Tim was my senior year, December 2015 or something, and I basically told him, hey I’ve never met you before but obviously read a lot of your work and I’m really excited to take your class. The last class he taught was a class on responsibility, like moral responsibility, also actually now that I think about it, super fitting because responsibility is a core concept of my democratic theory, as it is of Rosenbluth and Shapiro, as it is of Wilson, as it is of Hamilton.

Daniel (00:55:50):

Right, Rosenbluth/Shapiro, the book’s Responsible Parties.

Victor (00:55:51):

Yeah, I literally didn’t even connect that, I don’t know if they’re actually connected, but the semantic overlap is significant.

Daniel (00:56:04):

I mean this is what you were saying earlier about Proust, an intellectual life is only intelligible in retrospect.

Victor (00:56:10):

Yes.

Daniel (00:56:11):

Can I tell you a Chris Korsgaard story? Because you mentioned.

Victor (00:56:15):

I will say I did go to Korsgaard’s office hours once, in which I asked her what her favorite novel was and she said Middlemarch, which is also my favorite novel in English. So it was a short but a memorable interaction.

Daniel (00:56:33):

All right, while I’m getting “bookshelf-mogged” as, was it M.J.R. Schneider or somebody maybe it was “Jack” earlier—I couldn’t help but notice, you said in English. What’s your favorite novel not in English? What’s the language?

Victor (00:56:50):

So I don’t yet know, I can’t read French, although when I look at French text—so I did Latin in middle school and high school, and then I obviously am a native English speaker, and been learning German for the past three years—and so you kind of piece it together, like I look at a French text and can understand vaguely like 25% of it, especially the kind of more technical terms like “representative” is “représentatif” or “initiative”—which is used in Rousseau—”initiative”. So I cannot yet read Proust in French, but Proust’s In Search of Lost Time would probably be my favorite modern non-English novel.

Daniel (00:57:40):

I see, but you haven’t read it in the original.

Victor (00:57:42):

Yeah I hope to learn to read French at some point in the future, possibly for this project, although it depends on the opportunity cost of learning languages.

My favorite pre-modern non-English novel is Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s one of the four classic novels in Chinese history. Like I cannot emphasize enough how I love the story. It’s about basically the fall of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period which followed it. But yeah, it’s just so good. I’ve watched it, listened to it, read it in translation. I can’t read literary Chinese yet either, but that’s a long-ish term aspiration. But yeah, so those are probably the top three that I can think of off the top of my head, at least in terms of things that would be consensus classics.

Daniel (00:58:45):

This isn’t Ezra Klein. I’m not asking for your three books, Victor! But if anybody wants to level up to some real literature after that, The Monster at the End of This Book, I thought it would be way scarier than it was, I highly recommend it. Actually it is a pretty great book if your friends have just had new kids, it’s a good gift. Okay so that was amazing, I didn’t know Chris’s favorite novel was Middlemarch.

You’ll never believe this, I was actually Chris Korsgaard’s teaching fellow for Kant’s Ethical Theory, there was like a five-alarm fire, “we need somebody, help!” And I was just ready to go write my dissertation and stuff, I was like what should I do? I was talking to my advisors and they’re like, I don’t know, it’s money, and it was a significant amount of money relative to my grad student stipend, and I burned it all on delicious food and drinks, but I lived like a king in Cambridge for that semester. I loved it, I mean her lectures were like paintings, they were just amazing. So Chris Korsgaard’s this Kantian ethicist, author of Sources of Normativity, Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Actually I really recommend the essays in Creating the Kingdom of Ends for anybody doing philosophy, I think they’re super creative and fantastic.

So, I love this, early on we were getting ready to do my first TA session, so it was after the lecture, and Chris is waiting for the elevator on the second floor of Emerson Hall, the philosophy department. And I have never TA’d a Kant class before, but I took a class on Kant’s theoretical philosophy in undergrad, and I’d read a little bit of Kantian ethics in other contexts. I read the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but this was going to go way beyond that. And I was joining in week two or three, so I was midstream, and I remember Chris was so eloquent in the lectures and so beautifully explaining everything, but then sometimes things don’t translate into other types of explanations. So I was like, Chris, do you have any advice about what I should cover for my first recitation section? She said, “It’s a good question. I think you should try to cover the main ideas.” And then she stepped into the elevator and the door just closes on me! I don’t think there was any malice, and I think she did point to one idea that was worth covering, but that stuck with me. [DM: because it was funny!]

The other story that stuck with me was, she really stood by me at the end of the semester when I was—I realize grade inflation is a big problem and so on, but I had these students that were writing unbelievably good essays, and I was like I don’t know what to tell you, the grades just came out a bit higher than I expected. And she said, “our TAs do so much work for us, I’m gonna stand by them and their judgment on this.” So I appreciated that she stood by [me], she was actually just fantastic pleasure to work with and I learned so much.

Victor (01:02:24):

Yeah, I was going to say, two quick responses, so I’ve read some essays from Creating the Kingdom of Ends but I read Sources of Normativity as a senior, fall 2015, in a grad seminar in political theory with Eric Beerbohm, my undergrad thesis advisor—who I’m very close with, probably the longest standing mentor that I’ve had—and Michael Rosen.

Daniel (01:02:50):

Wow, interesting.

Victor (01:02:51):

It was an amazing seminar. It was the “Ethical Foundations of Political Thought.”

Daniel (01:02:56):

So cool.

Victor (01:02:57):

Scanlon, Bernard Williams, and Korsgaard, etc. So yeah, I loved it. I was blown away. I was like, I can’t believe this [Sources of Normativity] is so short. It’s like 150 pages or something. I was like, oh my god. Yeah, so she writes beautifully.

The other thing which I was going to say is, again it’s mind-blowing, it’s a blessing and a curse to have taken eight years in between undergrad and grad school, because it means that the graduate students who overlapped with me are associate professors, and my friends who became academics are like assistant professor at MIT, assistant professor at Harvard, assistant professor at Yale, so yeah it’s, again, a blessing and a curse. But yeah, so that means that you would have taught, surely taught, some of my friends.

Daniel (01:03:46):

That’s hilarious. I have to mention one person who was in that class, one student in my section, was Aaron Suduiko.

Victor (01:03:58):

Yeah, Aaron!

Daniel (01:04:00):

You know Aaron!?

Victor (01:04:01):

Yeah okay so I should also say, so that makes sense now. I messaged him like, hey hope you’re doing well at USC—

Daniel (01:04:10):

He’s a PhD student in philosophy at USC now, great philosopher—

Victor (01:04:14):

Yep he was the year behind me at Harvard—either one year or two—and also did philosophy. We were great friends in undergrad, and then yeah he’s very interested in the philosophy of video games, wrote a lot about it, took some time off to work on that, and then started at USC. I messaged him recently and was like, hey how are you doing, hope things are going well, I’m doing this Substack with Daniel Muñoz, and he was like oh yeah I love Dan! I will say, I mean obviously we had met briefly at PPE last year, but I didn’t realize the density of overlapping connections which now that you say that you literally TF’d at Harvard while I was there it makes much more sense, but like just this past weekend was at Mercatus for the Adam Smith Fellowship with your undergrad advisee Elijah.

Daniel (01:05:02):

Oh Elijah Parish, at Berkeley, yeah amazing.

Victor (01:05:05):

Yep, I’m good friends with Haidun Liu, one of your IHS mentees.

Daniel (01:05:16):

This is like you’re living in the extended Danielverse.

Just to be clear, I never actually went to an Ivy League school, but I guess I did take their Ivy money to TF for them. I have to mention, I’m just blown away by the fact that we took a class together. I didn’t realize. Because it was a reasonably big class, but yeah that’s fascinating.

Victor (01:05:48):

One of my friends who was the same year as me—

Daniel (01:05:55):

Sorry, did you see Jackademic Philosophy? [comment in the Substack Live chat] I don’t know if you know this, but there were some highly credible accusations that I was a self-appointed MIT graduate. This is deep in the archives. But yeah please, sorry.

Is Daniel Muñoz blind?

Victor (01:06:10):

One of my friends and my partner John’s roommate at some point, Garrett Lam, was also a philosophy major or a “concentrator” in my year, so you might have known him. Of the people from that class, I remember Garrett was in it. You may or may not have been one of his TFs. He was very close with Selim and then also Josh Greene, interestingly, when he was at Harvard. So he kind of straddled the line between neuroscience and philosophy.

Daniel (01:06:52):

I’m realizing we’ve only got about 20 minutes before you gotta go catch a train, so we’re gonna maximize value here for a little bit.

So we’re getting a little feel for your intellectual background, like where you came from, and I want to just throw some other ideas at you, and see what you think, given both the framework you’ve been developing and just your extensive knowledge, so Quentin in the chat asked, what do you think about the various social choice functions, aka voting methods like perhaps rank choice voting and things like this, that are being constantly advocated for as a replacement for plurality systems?

Just as like a little background for people, plurality rule means whoever gets the most votes wins even if you don’t get a majority of the votes. So in a really crowded field, you can win with just a handful of not that many percentage points of vote share. But then there’s a lot of, “how do you conduct a vote if you don’t want plurality rule?” Well, there’s just this huge smorgasbord of various options, some of which are accused of being gimmicky by people in the biz, some of which are are hailed as like the the democratic cure-all. So yeah, what do you think about some of these?

Victor (01:08:11):

Yeah, so Quentin is a friend of mine, he’s a Yale undergrad who’s about to join the Marines.

Daniel (01:08:18):

I feel like people have 10,000 times more stuff in common than I realized—that or there’s sampling bias!

Victor (01:08:26):

One more just random thing. So James Bondarchuk, who was one of my TFs in undergrad, is sharing your stuff, and then Daniel Greco, I met Dan Greco at Hélène Landemore’s, one of my advisors, book launch party in February for her new book Politics Without Politicians—and your Substack, Dan Greco’s Substack, Joseph Heath’s Substack, were my three favorite academic philosophy ones.

Daniel (01:08:55):

Let’s go! That’s what I’m talking about.

Victor (01:08:56):

And it forms a citation cartel, right, like you’re all citing each other, sharing each other!

Daniel (01:09:03):

It’s called mutual influence!

Dan Greco, legend of MIT. We would play Koosh, where you just hit a Koosh ball with a racket, and there was a coat hanger hanging from a pipe on the ceiling, and the legend was that Dan Greco alone had like the aim to get the Koosh ball through the hanger, and if you did you would instantly get—

Victor (01:09:32):

I did talk with him a little bit about MIT philosophy but he never told me this!

Daniel (01:09:35):

Well, this is almost certainly all apocryphal legend, misty stuff that appeared after he left. But the legend was that if you get a Koosh Ball through the hanger, then you automatically get an A on your M.A. thesis. (It’s called the second-year paper.)

Victor (01:09:55):

Yes, there are a lot of—there’s also Dan Williams. There’s a lot of Dan inflation going on in the Substack world!

Daniel (01:10:04):

That’s right, so we got derailed, okay so we were talking about Dan Greco and yeah—oh no James Bondarchuk! Ok please go ahead, I can save my James Bondarchuk story for later, there’s just a little audio delay, it’s all you.

Victor (01:10:36):

Okay yeah sorry. So just to quickly answer, so I don’t have a strong position on which specific electoral system would be optimal, other than the general, like, people’s political and epistemic constraints matter, right. So if you have an electoral system that you need a PhD in economics to understand, it’s probably not going to be an effective one, even if in theory it would be optimal in some social choice theoretic sense.

And that’s partly the politics of RCV [ranked choice voting], which I mean I think RCV is in principle a great system and would love to see it spread more. One challenge of getting municipalities, states, etc. to adopt RCV is there’s a perception that it’s very complicated, and especially it depends, there’s a lot of different varieties. This was a serious consideration when John and Danielle were deciding which electoral reform to put on the ballot in November. There’s a perception that it would be easier to explain, and you would approximately achieve similar desired ends, if we did Top Two, which is very easy to explain, and then fusion. So those two, those are very simple elements but put together achieve something new and better.

And I can also say actually just to quickly tie into the academic stuff with Ian and Frances Rosenbluth’s book, so the normative end their aiming for is essentially electoral competition which competes for the median voter and satisfies median voter preferences most of the time. So I agree, that’s my interpretation of this All-Party Primaries ballot initiative as well. It incentivizes legible, general, accountable competition, which I as a package, call “Responsible Competition”, which is also the language that John and Danielle have been using.

The difference, though, is that, in the Rosenbluth and Shapiro book, they point to the past, you could say. There was a past in which parties, party elites controlled candidate selection more than the current system, and that system had real virtues. It did enable party leaders—long-term party leaders, who have a long time horizon—do have incentives to select candidates they think will win a general election.

Daniel (01:13:11):

Right, they wouldn’t pick somebody they wouldn’t pick a loser. Like there’s this famous case of Estes Kefauver, starting to win primaries and the party leaders are just like: no. This guy, we’re not going with this guy. And now it’s unthinkable that somebody could win the primaries and not get selected.

Victor (01:13:30):

That specific example might have literally been used in the Levitsky and Ziblatt How Democracies Die book, or at least it’s of that flavor. But so this reform is different than than saying we should restore party elite control over candidate selection. What this reform is, is it’s building on and reforming the primary system itself. It’s saying that we’re gonna have input from the people on candidate selection, but instead of it being a 5% of the Democratic Party and really of that 5% there’s heavy selection bias, we’re gonna open it up, and so it’s gonna be a general cross-section. It’s not gonna be the whole electorate voting in the primary, that’s unrealistic, but if it’s 5% of the electorate but it’s a more representative cross-sample voting, then that’ll incentivize competition for the center more than candidates whose main fear right now is being primaried from the extreme.

Daniel (01:14:37):

That sounds really interesting. I would love to see it implemented, if only for the epistemic value.

Victor (01:14:46):

Yeah. I will say also just, broadly speaking, the situation we’re in right now in the U.S. is in many ways structurally comparable to the position that the Framers faced in 1787.

Daniel (01:15:04):

Wait, what do you mean?

Victor (01:15:06):

So there’s widespread recognition that “the system” is not working. The problem is, though, that perception of dissatisfaction is not a constructive solution. There’s a coordination problem where even if everyone agrees the status quo is bad, you might not be able to coordinate on a preferred solution. And that was precisely the situation that Madison, Hamilton, Ben Franklin, George Washington, etc., that was the situation they faced. So the Constitution was basically a compromise, all-things-considered proposal to replace the status quo.

And I think we should resist just at the level of history, imagined histories where it was like, oh, everyone agreed the Constitution was the best thing ever. In New York, for example, Hamilton’s state, the Constitution was ratified by a 30 to 27 vote. The people who opposed it were predictably basically George Clinton’s cronies. So George Clinton, a powerful long-time governor, he opposed it because it against his political interest. People oppose things and support things for political interest.

A lot of times, it’s kind of inevitable that people who benefit from the status quo will oppose changes that change the status quo.

Daniel (01:16:35):

That’s such a close vote, my God!

Victor (01:16:37):

Yeah, and New York is the most striking and memorable for me because Hamilton is one of like my personal heroes, I would say. Hamilton, Wittgenstein, and Weber I’d say are my three role models in various ways.

But yeah so Hamilton—basically how the Constitution passed in New York was Hamilton personally persuaded, lobbied, bargained, negotiated with some of George Clinton’s cronies and basically got them to change their mind. And literally, if it’s a three-vote differential, that means he needed to sway two people.

Daniel (01:17:12):

Wow.

Victor (01:17:13):

Yeah, this is politics. This is real politics. And that’s the situation we’re facing today. And that’s also methodologically my overall standpoint, political theory as political science. Political theory is theorizing about politics, which is an empirical, historical phenomenon, and to understand politics you have to understand its history, differences across context, country, etc. to really I think do good democratic theory.

Alexander Hamilton

Daniel (01:17:44):

Oh man, that is some really fascinating history. I like the comparison, and I think just mathematically, there’s certain things that people aren’t good at grasping. Even if we are good at grasping, it takes some effort for us to grasp. Exponential growth being one, but I actually think that aggregation and negation are another. It’s just not true that we agree on all that much if we all agree we don’t want this. It’s just we might all disagree about this, but have massively conflicting preferences for all the actual concrete alternatives, one of which would need to be implemented in order for us to move away from this. That, I think, is just a surprisingly underrated point.

I’ll just point out also that this afflicts a lot of single-issue polling type of arguments, where I say “Everybody wants reform!” because nobody likes the status quo. Pick whatever reform you want. There’s a good chance most people don’t want that, by the same logic that you [just used]. So this is analogous to what voting theorists call “agenda manipulation”.

Victor (01:19:14):

Yes, put more neutrally, “agenda setting” is a paradigmatic example of initiative.

Daniel (01:19:23):

Ah, we’re bringing it back.

Victor (01:19:25):

Just really quickly, I should also say one very common way that realist political theory is both presented by its advocates and criticized is that you’re deflationary, you’re deflating the ideals we care about, you’re just saying it’s unrealistic, utopian, etc. That is not what this what my project is. My project is fully accepting the traditional ideals of liberal democracy. So the traditional, the constitutive ideals of democracy are collective agency and public accountability. And the constitutive ideals of liberalism are individual freedom and moral equality.

Normatively, I’m personally a center-left, left-liberal, however you want to characterize it. But I’m saying that realism as a methodology is at the level of the translation of ideals into reality via institutions. Institutions are the Aristotelian form by which we collectively act. And so institutional design matters, and institutional design is precisely where realism has its most analytical purchase and normative purchase. And I’m saying, my argument in a nutshell is that under contemporary conditions the descriptively but most fundamentally normatively best way for us to realize traditional ideals of liberal democracy is via a model of an executive initiative and legislative critique.

And precisely the core theoretical distinction that’s at the heart of this—the question which I think is one of if not the most important question of political theory, certainly democratic theory, today—is how do you distinguish democratic executive leadership from executive plebiscitarianism? What distinguishes FDR from Trump, or Wilson from Schmitt? I think the essence of it is essentially this. In both of them the executive makes a democratic representation claim. And in my particular language, I will say that the executive makes a general representation claim. The difference between my theory and Schmitt, and you could also say Posner and Vermeule’s Executive Unbound, a kind of moderate American version of Schmitt, is that the executive plebiscitarian makes a further claim which we should reject, that the democratic executive has a privileged or exclusive representation claim. Schmitt makes the exclusivity claim, Posner and Vermeule make the privileged claim. Whereas on my model of what a genuine liberal democracy looks like, the executive and legislature make co-equal but qualitatively distinct democratic representation claims. The executive makes a general representation claim, and the legislature makes a plural representation claim. And those are different forms of representation claim which are not reducible to each other, and in an ideal, well-functioning liberal democracy those are co-equal claims. And the dialectic between them is precisely what defines the politics of liberal democracy.

Which is also, by the way, just to tie into Linz—Juan Linz, very influential, very influenced by his work, especially on the comparative politics of presidentialism, etc. but I disagree with pretty much every aspect of his argument. So at a normative level, Linz says the problem with presidentialism is the problem of competing democratic legitimacy claims Between the president and the legislature. On my model, that is the essence of liberal democracy, the multiplication of claims to represent the people. And then just descriptively—and here I clearly think like a philosopher who moved into political science—Linz’s definition of presidentialism is a cluster definition which conflates at least six distinct dimensions.

[Daniel reacts flamboyantly.]

Yeah it’s a strong claim, I know, but it’s right. So Linz’s definition runs together: democratic legitimacy, a selection mechanism, a sanction mechanism, a removal mechanism, government formation, and a symbolic role. The best critique of Linz in the literature, which is José Cheibub’s 2007 book Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy, has a much more tight definition, which is essentially a presidential system is a system in which “governments cannot be removed by the assembly”, i.e. the executive cannot be removed by the legislature. Even that definition, though, is problematic conceptually from the start. Because actually, even in presidential systems there is in fact a mechanism for the legislature to remove the executive, it’s called impeachment!

So the problem with this whole literature, other than the analytical conflations, is that it’s mistaking accidents for essences in the Aristotelian sense. The essence of presidentialism, I’m claiming, is simply the independent selection of the executive—it’s the selection mechanism. But independent selection need not imply that the legislature has no removal mechanism nor need it imply that the legislature has no sanction mechanism etc.

Here’s a thought experiment: You could easily imagine a presidential system—still by essence, presidential—in which you have a unicameral legislature that can impeach the executive by simple majority vote at will. And so the president is still selected independently from the legislature but can be removed by the legislature. There’s nothing inherent about presidentialism as such which makes that impossible. And that actually sounds quite similar to what, when people say “parliamentarism”—which again I think “parliamentarism” is a bad concept; the more apt term is “prime ministerialism” under modern conditions—the distinction between presidentialism and prime ministerialism is essentially at the level of the selection mechanism, and then also the formal possibility of divided government, which is a real concern. So if you think divided government is this all-things-considered super terrible thing, then yeah, maybe you don’t like presidentialism, but but that’s a very different argument than what Linz is putting forth and what this literature is putting forth.

Daniel (01:25:59):

Amazing. That was just such a great way to encapsulate your thinking on this. I’m so grateful that you came on and talked with us about your work and your background. This was awesome.

I wanted to ask two last questions, and we’ve got three minutes, so feel free to make them just that. One, Ben Conroy in the chat asks, could you say a little more about the difference between the plural and general claims on your view? So you said that the legislature has like a plural claim to legitimacy whereas the executive is collective, is that right?

Victor (01:26:38):

It’s a plural representation claim. So this is also building on literature in the last 20 years in representation theory in democratic theory. People like Lisa Disch, Nadia Urbinati, Mark Warren, Andrew Rehfeld, Jane Mansbridge. So yeah, essentially, and I’m deliberately using the terms “general” and “plural” because I’m kind of appropriating Rousseau’s general will, Dahl’s pluralism, etc., right? But yeah the claims themselves are actually quite familiar. It’s the claim that the president is the only elected official that represents the whole country, that speaks for the whole country, that makes a claim about the direction that the country as a whole should go. Whereas the legislature, in its ideal, is a plural body, it ought to be a plural diverse body representing the various facets of society—geographically, socially, politically, culturally, etc. So what makes a good legislature a good legislature is precisely this feature.

Hélène in her work is really building on this. She’s saying that essentially if that’s what we care about in a legislature, then actually election is a terrible mechanism by which to—or I shouldn’t say “terrible” because then I sound like I’m endorsing the view; her argument is that it’s a bad mechanism—but the argument then is, if we think that, then therefore we need to switch to sortition as a selection mechanism for legislatures to achieve descriptive representation. This is the “mirror theory of representation”, is what it’s been called in the literature by people like Eric Nelson in his very fascinating book The Royalist Revolution.

So that’s in a nutshell the argument. The difference I’m saying is that those are co-equal although qualitatively distinct representation claims that the executive and legislature make, and that dialectic, that dynamic between them, is the defining feature of modern liberal democracy.

Daniel (01:28:43):

Crushed it. Last question: Is there an academic paper or book that you’d recommend, or just that you love?

Victor (01:28:51):

Yes, okay I’ll pull a couple books—this will be your version of the Ezra Klein three books.

Daniel (01:28:56):

That’s right, that’s right.

Victor (01:29:01):

Okay so, the GOAT [holding up copy of the book]. I literally think this is the most important single work of 20th century political theory. Constitutional Government in the United States, Woodrow Wilson 1908.

I won’t recommend Wittgenstein’s Investigations because I think your audience is likely very familiar with that, so I cheated and introduced a fourth. So the second one is E.E. Schattschneider’s Party Government [holding up copy of the book]. So this is basically the theoretical predecessor of Rosenbluth and Shapiro, they’re building on this. I think Schattschneider, he’s kind of a canonical figure in American political development, and I think he’s seeing a real revival of interest in his work in democratic theory.

The last one—oh shit I shouldn’t have ended with this...

Daniel (01:29:54):

It’s all good.

Victor (01:29:56):

Carl Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [holding up copy of the book]. The proximate cause for basically this like entire synthesis to come about was reading this book over the Yale spring break in March of this year. I cannot emphasize enough, I read it, it’s so concise, it’s so impactfully written, the prose is amazing, and it’s just so incisive. Basically when I read this book, I realized, the second edition of this was published in 1926 exactly 100 years ago, and he’s making pretty much the exact same argument that I was kind of inchoately trying to grasp towards—the same diagnosis, different normative conclusion; that’s the key difference.

But the other thing, the thing that really crystallized it, is that he was citing all the same people whom I found the most fascinating across the entire history of political thought. He was citing Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, the Federalists, Gaetano Mosca, Bagehot, Mill, Robert Michels—almost like in a flash, it was okay, I know what I want to say.

Daniel (01:31:15):

That was perfect. Everybody, make your spring break 2027 plans now, get a copy of one of these books!

Victor, thank you so much, please don’t miss your train. I really appreciate you.

Victor (01:31:27):

Yes thanks so much, this was an incredible opportunity, thanks. Look forward to seeing you at PPE in November!

Daniel (01:31:32):

I’ll see you at the PPE Society. Shout out James Bondarchuk—I’ll tell your story some other time. Bye!

1. Joe commenting on BIG iff TRUE is like when Letterman first went on Conan—and just so you know how dated this reference is, I was literally 1 year old when that happened.

I do love one of Conan’s lines in that interview, though.

CONAN: When I first got this job, I came here to 30 Rock—

LETTERMAN: How did you get this job? Was it a theme writing contest?

CONAN: Yes, it was a “What would I do with a talk show?” I was fourth.