On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry sits down with Andy Craig — a libertarian election-policy expert whose career arc runs from the Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson's 2016 campaign to writing election-reform language that made it into the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022.

It's a wide-ranging and unusually candid conversation about how America's democratic breakdown looks from outside the red-blue binary — and why structural reform, not just partisan victory, is essential if liberal democracy is going to survive the Trump era.

Craig, now an election-policy fellow at the Rainey Center and a contributing editor at The Unpopulist, describes January 6 as a turning point, not only politically but intellectually — a moment when democracy reform stopped being theoretical and became urgent:

"This wasn't just some guy with policies I disagree with. This was a threat to the Republic."

From that starting point, the conversation zeroes in on how America's winner-take-all electoral system fuels polarization and minority rule. Craig argues that the problem isn't simply Trump or MAGA, but the incentives baked into the system itself:

"Our electoral system has resulted in a kind of minority-rule dynamic — and that incentivizes more authoritarian measures."

One of the episode's most valuable contributions is Craig's explanation of how the two-party system systematically disenfranchises large portions of the electorate — not only third-party voters, but millions of people trapped in "safe" districts with no meaningful representation:

"If you're in a safe Republican district or a safe Democratic district, you might be 30 or 40 percent of the vote — and you get no seat at the table."

Craig is not completely pessimistic. He sees some hope for the long-term recovery of American democracy.

"[T]here is a backlash to Trump. He won't be around forever. There will be a moment, I think, and we use the term reconstruction for it. And I think that's an appropriate analogy and framework. I mean, we're going to have to do a lot of rebuilding and retooling our institutions to make sure this doesn't happen again. And it's not going to be just returning to the status quo."

The discussion moves beyond diagnosis to reforms that are often mentioned abstractly but rarely unpacked with this level of clarity: proportional representation, fusion voting, and the uniquely American role of state-run party primaries. Craig makes the case that these aren't fringe ideas, but practical tools — many achievable without constitutional amendments — for rebuilding a more representative and less brittle democracy.

Equally striking is Craig's account of the libertarian movement's own fracture in the age of MAGA. There is a core disagreement, says Craig, between libertarians who gravitate toward "burn it all down" politics and others — including Craig and his colleagues at The Unpopulist — who came to see defending liberal democracy itself as the necessary foundation for any serious debate about policy.

As Micah notes during the episode, this conversation maps a political space many Americans rarely hear articulated: socially liberal, institution-respecting, deeply alarmed by authoritarianism — and unsatisfied with a two-party system that repeatedly hands sweeping power to narrow factions.

For anyone thinking seriously about how to get beyond our current democratic crisis — not just survive the next election — this episode is valuable listening.

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The Unpopulist: https://www.theunpopulist.net/