Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Today's guest has been Ansel, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Newfield

College University of Oxford. He's the author of a recently released book, Why Politics

Fails. I was really interested in speaking with Ben because his academic work and this

book obviously is focused on the implicit metatheme of the Realignment podcast. Why, considering

the rising stakes and potential coalitions, doesn't the American political system successfully

address, resolve, or form new consensus on any of the big issues we regularly discuss

on this show. Ben's work and this overall conversation is a great starting point and

it'd be helpful and someone anti-possumistic to apply this framework to every specific

issue you care the most about. That said, huge thank you to the foundation for American

innovation, for supporting the work of this podcast. Hope you all enjoy this conversation.

Ben Ansel, welcome to the Realignment. Thank you so much for having me here. Your book

raises an obvious question. When did politics succeed? You could pick any time, place,

country, obviously you are in the UK, you've often spent time in the United States. When

would you say it's a period people could look back on politics as they process succeeding?

It's a great question and it's a good cold open as well, I'm not sure to have me think

about the positive moments. I'm going to answer that in a positive way but I'm going

to do so in a slightly tragic way because I think the big moments when major reforms have

occurred to the apparatus of government and of public services have been in bad times,

have been either in the United States during the Great Depression. I think your listeners

will have different views about the merits of the New Deal and the merits of all the policies

creating them but some of them have been incredibly long-lived. Social security being the most

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