What happens when a party forms inside of another party? How is the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, affecting the Democratic Party? And how did the the Tea Party shift the GOP's platform back in 2010?
Today, Ruth Bloch-Rubin from the University of Chicago walks us through intra-party movements. They've happened before, they'll happen again, and they tend to be a bellwether for significant shifts in party ideology.
Transcript
Nick Capodice: Han, you know, when you're at a party and for some reason, I don't know if it's the music or it's the mix of work friends versus real life friends, but it ends up being just sort of a dud.
Hannah McCarthy: Too many times to count.
Nick Capodice: But then, and for me, this happens without exception in the kitchen. You see a group in there and they're laughing and hooting and hollering and just having a time. And [00:00:30] you say to yourself, I should be there in that kitchen.
Hannah McCarthy: It's always the kitchen, Nick. Every party should just be a kitchen.
Nick Capodice: Or another party scenario. That phenomenon where one of your friends brings a bunch of people that nobody knows, and everybody's wondering, who are these people who invited them? This party metaphor relates to something going on right now in 2026, and it's happened a ton of times before in US history. It's when a political party develops [00:01:00] a second party inside the bigger party. These are called intra parties, and for today's episode, I am using the DSA as an example, the Democratic Socialists of America. But we are also going to touch on the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms.
Archival: It's an interesting combination of people here in Hudsonville, and it has been at a lot of these Tea Party events, because it's not just about politics. That is not just about electing a particular party.
Nick Capodice: And maybe even the free Silver movement in the 1896 [00:01:30] election.
Archival: We will answer the demand for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.
Hannah McCarthy: As much as I would love to listen to you impersonate William Jennings Bryan all day long, I think we got to focus on the task at hand. Why does this happen? This intra party thing? Why do parties develop within parties?
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: In a two party system, there's always going to be elements of a party that are not happy [00:02:00] with what their party is doing.
Nick Capodice: This is Ruth Block Rubin. She's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: And so often those groups, those sort of nascent, like minded members organize and they come together and they start to identify as a group of people who don't like what's happening. And rather than just a bunch of sort of grumpy curmudgeons, which is sometimes what happens, right? Like people just are unhappy, but they don't do anything about it. But having decided to do something about it, often what happens is that groups emerge and start to have what [00:02:30] I think of as like an institutional scaffolding, right? Like they become an organization, they have a name, they have members, they meet regularly, they start to share or discuss and prioritize different policies.
Nick Capodice: So what happens when this dissatisfied group forms within another group? What does it do to the larger party? How does it affect campaigns, fundraising, or even the identity of the party itself? It is an intra party in the USA here on Civics 101. [00:03:00] Stick around. You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about a political movement, an organization, a topic that is so hot right now. Hot as in popular or hot as in don't touch it. Both are accurate. In this instance, the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA. And before I get [00:03:30] any further, Hannah, I further, further. And before I go any further, Hannah, I gotta get something out of the way. Small d small s Democratic socialism is a political philosophy which anyone can espouse at any point, and I'm going to get into that later. The DSA is, however, a club.
Hannah McCarthy: And I know we're going to get to intraparty, but first, can we do political parties generally? I know the framers were very [00:04:00] concerned about parties, George Washington especially, who said they, quote, distract the public counsels and enfeeble the public administration.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Nobody hated a party more than G. Dubs.
Hannah McCarthy: There ain't no party like a George Washington party because a George Washington party doesn't happen.
Nick Capodice: That guy would see a balloon on a mailbox and he would tell his carriage driver, like, just keep going. And even though Washington wasn't a fan, James Madison wrote on several occasions that parties were inevitable in our newly [00:04:30] created governmental system. Now, I want to be careful today with the word factions, because there is a debate as to whether parties are factions not going to get into that. But in Federalist ten, James Madison explained that we are a large country. We got a lot of disparate states, and to get anything done at all, people are going to have to work together. And he was right. We got parties almost immediately and we still got them now. But to your question, Hannah, [00:05:00] what are parties?
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: Well, so let's take a step back. What are parties? Right. Because the DSA, you know, is often thought of as a political party. And so for political scientists, we can think about parties as organizations that operate on like three different dimensions, three dimensions.
Nick Capodice: You know, I love a list.
Hannah McCarthy: Hannah and a party.
Nick Capodice: Taylor wrote, do you love parties? And I was like, I used.
Hannah McCarthy: To, I don't know if you do, actually.
Nick Capodice: I used to be like the party as a party animal in the world. What [00:05:30] happened?
Hannah McCarthy: People don't have parties anymore.
Nick Capodice: That's what happened. Dimension number one, parties as they operate in government.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: So those are the coalitions of office holders who sort of pre-commit to work together to advance a shared agenda.
Nick Capodice: These are people in office, Hannah, legislators and their staff who govern. They write bills, they vote on bills. And most of the time they support each other's work.
Hannah McCarthy: And also a lot of the time oppose [00:06:00] the work coming from the other side. Like when you watch the state of the Union and everyone is sitting in the House chamber and they're either on the left or the right side, split into teams, as it were, I always sort of thought of it as the groom's side or the bride's side.
Nick Capodice: It's a lot like that. And each of those sides have their own agenda, which they share with the rest of their party.
Hannah McCarthy: The party platform. Right?
Nick Capodice: Exactly. And the party platform has myriad planks in it. What are we as Republicans or we as Democrats trying to achieve right [00:06:30] now as a bloc? Okay. Party dimension number two, parties as organizations.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: A network of candidates, interest groups, office holders who channel resources and information and campaign assistance to each other. Uh, and you could think of it almost like a movement.
Hannah McCarthy: Resources and assistance. So first and foremost, money, right?
Nick Capodice: Lots of money.
Hannah McCarthy: And then there's so much more. Right. There are campaign workers, [00:07:00] volunteers. You've got people knocking on doors. You've got pollsters and think tanks and lawyers and fundraisers, and then you've got the various committees that actually draft the platforms. The two main parties are big and intricate organizations, and a ton of people work within those organizations.
Nick Capodice: Yes. Finally, the third dimension parties in the electorate, which is you and me and everyone out there listening. We the people who vote, [00:07:30] how do we interact with the party?
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: We're often thinking about the information that the party brand, the name that's associated with the organization, what that conveys to voters. And so we typically think that, like one thing that parties do in the electorate is that for most voters, most people have, you know, we talk about politics as a sideshow to life, right? Most of us are not spending all of our time thinking about politics. And so what party brands or names do as they convey information about candidates or [00:08:00] existing office holders, policy commitments or values or ideas, or are a way to predict how they're likely to govern.
Nick Capodice: And so to illustrate this third dimension, Hannah, let us say your Uncle Vernon stands up and calls himself a libertarian at the McCarthy family Christmas.
Hannah McCarthy: Among all those JFK Irish catholics.
Hannah McCarthy: Uh, I do not actually have an Uncle Vernon. Everyone. But I understand where you're going, Nick.
Nick Capodice: All right, so what Vern means, does he go by Vern?
Speaker 7: He [00:08:30] does.
Nick Capodice: So what Vern means isn't that he's literally a politician who's running for office as a libertarian. Nor does it mean he got a job as the communications director for the local chapter of the Libertarian Party.
Nick Capodice: Right?
Hannah McCarthy: Old Vern means I like libertarian ideas, and I intend to vote that way.
Nick Capodice: Exactly. Thank you for sharing your opinion, Vern. So taken in the aggregate, these three party dimensions You have basically a party brand, and for a lot of [00:09:00] folks, even the independents out there, that brand is a huge part of how they vote.
Hannah McCarthy: As evidenced by people being a bit confused as to what to do in the voting booth when they do not see a capital D or capital R or a capital I next to someone's name who is running for, say, Registrar of Deeds. Party affiliation is, I think, one of the most important factors for the majority of American voters.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely.
Hannah McCarthy: All [00:09:30] right. So that's party's all wrapped up with pretty pink ribbons on it. Let's talk about parties within parties.
Nick Capodice: Factions within factions.
Hannah McCarthy: Wheels within wheels.
Nick Capodice: So Hannah, occasionally we see the formation of factions, caucuses, and coalitions inside political parties. So take, for example, a recent wave of candidates who may be listed on the ballot as Democrats, but they distinguish themselves from their peers by referring to themselves as democratic [00:10:00] socialists and in some cases, who have been endorsed by a different organization called the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA.
Archival: The Democratic Socialists seem to be doing considerably better than they used to be, and they have the chance to knock off Democratic incumbents in Congress. And part of the reason for that why we're seeing these Democratic socialists is take a look here. Net favorability.
Hannah McCarthy: Which does sound like a political party.
Nick Capodice: It does sound like it, Hannah, but it is not, even though it shares the same three dimensions that Ruth [00:10:30] talked about. I mean, it has people in government who are members. It is an organization, and people recognize it as a brand. It is not a party.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: So, you know, if we're thinking about like, what is the DSA? The DSA, and I think its current incarnation is doing some of all of these things, right? Like there are individuals who are getting elected to higher office who presumably would try and work with other DSA members to advance a shared agenda. That's where the parties and government dimension. They are alive [00:11:00] and well. Organization that are helping to get candidates elected, and distributing resources and sharing information about policy ideas and things like that. And then I think we have a fair amount of evidence that identifying as a democratic socialist conveys information to voters about how they are different from other candidates who are running with other party brands. And so they're telling voters, by identifying as a member of the DSA, I'm going to govern differently. There are different policy priorities that I have. [00:11:30]
Nick Capodice: And more on those policies later. Hannah. But first, I want to talk about one thing that this influx of DSA candidates has in common with previous examples of intraparty factions, and that is that it's happening at a time of dissatisfaction with the status quo. The upshot for those people who are dissatisfied is that when these happen, they tend to be a bellwether for significant change.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: Interparty organizations are usually really core players in major policy [00:12:00] debates across congressional history, and that's certainly been true of the 20th century. So if we think about big changes in fights within Congress in the progressive era over tariff policy, railroad regulation.
Nick Capodice: This was the internal feud over tariffs in the McKinley administration that ten years later led Teddy Roosevelt to completely break off from the Republicans at the time and form the short lived anti-corruption tax. The wealthy Bull Moose Party, which started as a sort of rebellion inside [00:12:30] the party.
Archival: I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: Progressive Republicans and populist Democrats were, uh, key foot soldiers in those battles within their parties and then often working together, uh, in the mid-century. We think about, you know, the civil rights era fights over passing civil rights legislation took place primarily between conservative Southern Democrats and Liberal Democrats over the direction of the Democratic Party [00:13:00] and used their respective organizations to either promote civil rights or try and delay civil rights through Congress's committee system or on the floor.
Hannah McCarthy: And, Nick, you and I know what happened after that intraparty fight. The country saw what political scientists call a realignment. The Democrats and the Republicans dramatically shifted their ideologies.
Nick Capodice: And for a much more recent example of an intraparty taking shape, Hannah. Let's take a little trip back in [00:13:30] time to the 2008 presidential election.
Archival: But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
Nick Capodice: Barack Obama had won the presidency. The Democratic Party had a unified government, which means they controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency. And after this election, Republicans were nursing their losses, trying [00:14:00] to figure out what went wrong. And many of them were pretty unhappy with their own party. George W Bush had left office deeply unpopular, and some on the right felt like their team had lost the plot. And that kind of a situation is ripe for an intraparty movement to gather steam.
Archival: Congressman Paul, you voted against the war. Why are all your fellow Republicans up here wrong?
Archival: That's a very good question. And you might ask the question, why are 70% of the [00:14:30] American people now wanting us out of there?
Nick Capodice: Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas who had formerly been affiliated with the Libertarian Party, had also run for president in 2008. He lost the GOP primary to Senator John McCain. But Ron Paul's campaign sparked a group of disenchanted Republicans that evolved into one of the most politically influential movements in our lifetime. The Tea party. Do you remember the Tea Party?
Hannah McCarthy: Of course.
Archival: You know, if media's not doing its job, if government [00:15:00] is just taking over every single thing that it can, and we now have an unfettered liberal. The radical left has got control of the process.
Nick Capodice: I remember when I first saw news coverage of the Tea Party movement. It was a video of people wearing Uncle Sam hats and Revolutionary War uniforms and wigs, and ceremoniously throwing tea bags in a bucket.
Hannah McCarthy: They were all about taxes, right?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, that was their big thing. Tax reform, eliminating wasteful spending with the end goal of reducing the national debt. [00:15:30] They pushed for lower taxes across the board for dramatically reducing the size of government. They were directly opposed to the Affordable Care Act, and they wanted to restrict immigration into the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: And we should say, Nick, it wasn't like all of the Republicans were on board. Tea party candidates deliberately ran against longtime Republican incumbents, particularly moderate Republicans.
Nick Capodice: And Tea Party rallies, were mocked on the air. One CNN commentator said that Tea [00:16:00] Party coverage on Fox News was, quote, a big story on CNN, a modest story, and MSNBC as a great story to make fun of. End quote. But the Tea Party grew and grew and became the deciding factor in the 2010 midterms.
Archival: Cnn is now ready to make a major projection. The Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives based on a statistical analysis of key seats. Key races all over the country.
Nick Capodice: Republicans won [00:16:30] 64 seats in the House in that election, and 32 of those were from the Tea Party. And once they got into office, they ushered in a new era of conservatism by working as a bloc in the Republican Party. They led debates about the debt ceiling. They succeeded in shutting down the government. They infuriated then speaker of the House John Boehner, and generally they took a more confrontational approach to politics. Now, the Republicans were in the majority only in the House, not [00:17:00] the Senate. But the Tea Party had strong enough numbers to force the entire Republican tent to swing in their direction.
Hannah McCarthy: Would we call the Tea Party successful?
Nick Capodice: Yes and no. Hannah. They're gone now. The name the Tea Party was pretty much abandoned by 2016, but their agenda, a lot of it has come to fruition. Not the reduction in the national debt, my heavens, but cutting down the size of the national government, greater immigration [00:17:30] restrictions and enforcement, a more confrontational approach to tactics. Would you say that's happened recently, Hannah?
Hannah McCarthy: I would I would also say these are hallmarks of the Maga movement.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And in some cases, the GOP as a whole, which goes to show you enter parties may be short lived in the year brackets of textbooks, but they have lasting impacts over time.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So now in 2026, we have an intra party movement bubbling up again, this time [00:18:00] on the other side of the aisle. What is the DSA about and what does that say, Nick, about politics right now?
Nick Capodice: We're going to get into that right after a quick break.
Hannah McCarthy: You're listening to civics 101. We are talking about intra party movements, including the Democratic Socialists of America. So, Nick, in the first half of the episode, we learned that intra parties do a lot of the same things as full fledged political [00:18:30] parties.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, they do, with one big exception. You're not going to see DSA on the ballot. So most members of the DSA are running as Democrats. There are like a scant few independents and Green Party members, but it is a capital D democratic movement. And I want to resay here, Hannah, just because you believe in the tenets of democratic socialism doesn't make you a member of this club. Now, the DSA is obviously in support of this political philosophy, [00:19:00] which is unchecked. Capitalism is an obstacle to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The word democratic at the beginning means that the people, not the state, dictate their government. This is in direct opposition to what we call authoritarian socialism, like we saw in, say, Stalinist Russia and socialism. It's kind of a tough word to define in one sentence, but I'll give it a whack. This is a quote from labor journalist Sarah Jaffe. She said it is, quote, that the people who do the work are [00:19:30] the ones who make the decisions about what gets produced and how.
Hannah McCarthy: And how Did this intraparty movement, the DSA, actually start?
Nick Capodice: Well, the club started in the United States in the 1980s, but it didn't really grow in popularity until Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential election.
Speaker 17: Today, with your support and the support of millions of people throughout our country, we begin a political [00:20:00] revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally.
Nick Capodice: And back then, there were around 6000 members of the DSA. And today there are over 120,000.
Hannah McCarthy: You said Bernie.
Hannah McCarthy: Self-describes as a democratic socialist. Is he a member of the DSA?
Nick Capodice: He's not. Ironically enough, he is not a member of the DSA, and anyone out there can say they're [00:20:30] ideologically a democratic socialist. But that is a far cry from being endorsed by the DSA. So if a candidate is running for office and they want that endorsement, the DSA requires they fill out a submission form to be evaluated. This form is over 100 pages long and the candidate has to prove their ideals are aligned with the movement.
Hannah McCarthy: And what are those ideals exactly?
Nick Capodice: Well, there are a lot, but the big one is shifting power [00:21:00] from the wealthy to the workers. They advocate for unions, for Medicare for all, for tuition free college opportunities, for affordable housing, and increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And another one, Hannah. And this one is big, especially as we are leading up to the midterms. The DSA has very strict rules about fundraising, i.e. no money from companies, no dark money from mysterious superPACs. If you are [00:21:30] found to be taking that money, you are immediately expelled from the DSA. Now I say this. I'm bringing this up, Hannah, because a ton of money from wealthy individuals has already poured into the midterms. A group of 20 people, 20 individuals have given over $1 billion. All right, so there are some big DSA names out there. The most recognizable ones in government right now being Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US rep from New York. [00:22:00] Rashida Tlaib, who is a US rep from Michigan, and Zoran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York City.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, can we talk about the division that intra parties can create? Because some of those things obviously overlap with Democrats in general, but not all of them. There are disagreements about supporting Israel, for example, or on whether to continue under the model of the Affordable Care Act or to create a new Medicare [00:22:30] for all system.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. You see, Democrats who have been in office for a long time saying, I'm not really down for this rebranding. This is not where I want the Democratic Party to go.
Archival: I am tired, tired, tired of a set of people on the very far left in the Democratic Party. My party telling us that in order for us to be progressives, we now have to believe ideas and support ideas that are completely nuts.
Archival: Prominent Democrat voices pushing back on the growing influence of the democratic socialist candidates they say [00:23:00] are ultimately going to hurt the Democrat Party.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: And so I think in that way, the work of the DSA is, is fits well within this sort of battle for the soul of the party. What's interesting, I think, about the DSA is that a lot of the candidates have, I think, a more oppositional relationship to the main party that they are trying to change. And I think given our current politics, that makes sense. If you [00:23:30] think about what we know about public opinion, Americans are disenchanted by both parties.
Hannah McCarthy: Now. You know, I like numbers backing things up. Nick, how disenchanted do we mean here?
Nick Capodice: Well, there was a survey in April of 2026 from the Pew Research Center, which asked Americans if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Republican and Democratic parties, and the numbers were nearly identical. 58% of people polled had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and 59% [00:24:00] of the Democratic Party. Now, you might want to just chalk this up to hyper partizanship, but pair that with the fact that the public is pretty evenly split by those who identify as Democrats or Republicans. And the math bears out, there are a lot of people out there unhappy with both parties.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: And so to gain political power, you have to resonate with voters. And so having more oppositional orientation to the party that you would like to change makes sense. And in other areas where parties [00:24:30] were more popular, having an oppositional approach to those parties would have been more costly.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. But if you think there's some tension in the Democratic Party outside of it, the DSA is used as a sort of catch all boogeyman.
Archival: Hassan Piker is a top surrogate for DSA, so we'll be asking our guests about his statements and much more. We have Fidel Castro's daughter on as well to respond to this news.
Archival: Yeah she does. She knows a thing or two about what she actually does.
Archival: About what this this may do in the history [00:25:00] that we've seen.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: We do see candidates, office holders of the opposing party try and characterize their own rivals, uh, by associating them with what they perceive to be the most unpopular elements of the opposition. Like this is consistently something that smart, savvy candidates do, right? You paint with broad brush strokes, you lump people in, you conflate policy differences, and you say they're [00:25:30] all for X, Y, or Z.
Nick Capodice: And honestly, Hannah, this is a really common tactic. You see members of the Democratic Party saying that any Republican is pro-Trump or Maga, regardless of their voting record.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: So that's not a new tactic. I think. What is I think so animating for people about democratic socialists is that the public opinion data we have about the public's perception of what socialism is, or what or who socialists are is not particularly favorable. And so [00:26:00] there are certainly folks who are concerned that identifying as democratic socialists or lumping Democratic socialists in with Democrats, or lumping Democrats and with Democratic socialists, runs the risk of alienating voters, and that whatever branding value you're getting from identifying as a democratic socialist creates a real risk either to you or to other members of the party with which you are closely affiliated.
Nick Capodice: And yes, Republicans have seized on that word, as well as other words to campaign [00:26:30] against DSA members.
Archival: We're the greatest nation in the history of world. We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic, or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism.
Nick Capodice: But then you gotta ask, is that branding effective?
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: I think an open question is how much attention voters are actually paying to all of that when they're getting into the voting booth and making their choices? And [00:27:00] if we think that voters are often most attentive to their pocketbook and their own financial comfort and the cost of living, then this may just be a big sideshow to the bigger question. That's going to animate how voters evaluate candidates, which is, you know, is this person going to make me and my family better off or not? And so, you know, you might say that a lot of the current consternation about democratic socialists is an attempt to distract from the bigger liability [00:27:30] for the party in power right now, Republicans, which is that, you know, whether through their own policies or, you know, broader secular trends, folks are very concerned about the cost of living. Inflation is high. And so you need to talk about something and you don't want to talk about the economy. And so you talk about socialists instead.
Hannah McCarthy: And Nick, like Ruth said, like you said, this kind of painting with the broad negative brush is par for the course. But what I find interesting is that you also see Democrats [00:28:00] this year directly attacking members of the DSA using that same negative brush for their own intraparty. Some Democrats also attack the DSA over the socialism thing, which makes me wonder what happens when you campaign as a radical. You want to make all of these big changes, and then you get elected and you find out that politics is about a lot of negotiation and compromise. You know, just like the Tea Party had [00:28:30] to work on some level with the rest of the GOP. If a wave of DSA candidates are actually elected, they're going to have to operate inside the Democratic Party. I mean, if you are an intraparty winner. Are your hopes and dreams just dashed? As soon as you take office?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. This is something I asked Ruth about. How do you walk that balance of working inside of a system that you're maybe trying to change?
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: I mean, [00:29:00] one thing that I do think is interesting about folks like Mandani, or really any person who's running sort of outside the box is they're going to have to govern with people who are operating inside the box. And so you, you create a potentially challenging situation where you've promised voters, or maybe you haven't promised them, but you've sort of conveyed to voters that you're going to do things differently. And so you're committed to doing that, but you have to work with a bunch of people who are not committed to doing things differently. And so invariably, you're going [00:29:30] to make compromises, and you're not going to be able to do all the things that you wanted. Do you have an.
Hannah McCarthy: Example of this?
Nick Capodice: I do. So very recently in New York City, which is facing a very tight budget, I have to say, Recently elected mayor. Zoran Mamdani, who supported teachers and unions in his campaign, sued to block a bill that would give $10,000 to teacher aides. An act of his that directly opposes the City council and the very powerful [00:30:00] teachers union. A spokesperson for the mayor said, quote, we will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table. End quote.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: And so then the challenge becomes conveying to voters that you are still serious and committed to the things you said you were, and that the whole system isn't broken just because you've had to do things that aren't exactly what you had promised, because that's any kind of collective decision making system requires compromise. And I think, uh, you know, this is important [00:30:30] for students to appreciate that, uh, you know, you're not always going to get everything you want. And I think in our current moment where it feels like some people are getting exactly what they want, it's hard to explain, you know, how do we know that that's happening or what are we not seeing all of the things that they did want that they couldn't get, that they took off the table. And so I think thinking through as educated political observers, what are the things we're not observing? What are the things that people have made strategic choices about [00:31:00] to do, to not to do? And what should we infer from all of that about our political system?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, what should we infer, Nicholas?
Nick Capodice: You know, I don't entirely know. Hannah. We are in a very, very polarized moment in US history. And I think we can say that in such polarization, people are looking to do something, anything, anything that results in a change. [00:31:30] And again, intra parties blossom and gain power in moments where people feel powerless, people feel like they're forced to wear a red or a blue suit.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: So I've been teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. And every time I teach a class on American politics. And there are students, usually a minority, who are very interested in third parties. You know, they come across the ideological spectrum. And so we get people on both the right and the left, [00:32:00] who are very interested in the possibility that we could break out of our existing party system. And I feel like my sad duty, in part, is to explain why that's really difficult. But I also think it equips people to think more creatively about ways to challenge the existing party system within the confines or constraints that we have. And so I think the DSA is actually a really interesting example of saying, well, maybe we're not going to run the same race as the two [00:32:30] major parties, and maybe that's not the goal. And we can work both outside and within the system to promote the policies that we care about.
Hannah McCarthy: You know, Nick, change is exciting to people, and it is far more likely to happen in a midterm election because during a presidential election, the parties tend to come together to rally behind the ideals of the person running for the big chair. You know, midterms are where the parties themselves can be affected by, for example, a [00:33:00] DSA, a tea party, a bull moose, whatever.
Ruth Bloch-Rubin: And so I think there are students who are really intrigued by that possibility, even if they themselves disagree with what they understand the DSA to represent, they see these third party movements or intra party movements as reasons to think that our politics is more flexible than they've been taught, and that there is real opportunity to change the status [00:33:30] quo, which I think is really important. One reason to study American politics is to understand the environment you're operating in, so that you can get the change that you want, and it may not be by the path that you wanted, but having some real substantive knowledge of how the system has worked makes it possible for you to figure out how you might want it to work differently in the future.
Nick Capodice: That [00:34:00] is intra parties today on Civics 101. This episode is made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Our staff includes Taylor Quimby music in this episode from blue Dot sessions, Epidemic Sound and The Party in My ears. Chris [00:34:30] Zabriskie Civics 101 is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.