He thinks machine politics is a distraction. Norm Ornstein has a different take from Jonathan Rauch and Elaine Kamarck on why our politics is broken. Ornstein believes increasing voter participation and reducing the role of money in politics are better goals, and that the Republican Party is far more of a culprit in creating dysfunction than are the Democrats. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a book late last year with Thomas Mann and EJ Dionne called "One Nation After Trump."

Show Notes:

Opening and closing song: "Mass Appeal" by Gangstarr. 

Norm's book from 2012, co-written with Thomas Mann and EJ Dionne, updated in 2016: "It's Even Worse Than It Looks Was: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism."

Norm's book from 2006, co-written with Thomas Mann: "The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track."

The paper by Jonathan Rauch and Ben Wittes from May 2017: "More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it."

Rauch & Wittes were responding in part to this paper from June 2015, by Mann and Dionne: "The futility of nostalgia and the romanticism of the new political realists."

And here's Elaine Kamarck's paper from April 2017: "Re-inserting peer review in the American presidential nomination process."

The exchange between Ornstein and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, at the beginning can be viewed here, and you can read about it here.

My profile from December on Warren Throckmorton, the evangelical professor who turned against 'reparative therapy' for gays.

My profile from September on Jemar Tisby, an African-American Christian living in the Deep South whose outlook on racial reconciliation darkened after the election of Donald Trump.

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