Conducted By Thomas Kidd

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. His most recent books are The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences, and Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (with Michael Graetz) and Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror. 

How would you evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of American democracy today, and what can be done to strengthen American democratic institutions?

I think that the biggest challenge to American democracy is that it was never really designed to be a democracy. It was designed to be, as Madison described, as a non-tyrannist republic. As a result, we have a presidential system with in an independently elected president, rather than a parliamentary system, and we have a separation of powers, and we have very strong federalism. We have massive numbers of veto points in the American political system, which tends to make reform and change very difficult.

How do you think spiraling campaign costs and the media have affected elections in the United States?

Huge campaign costs affect the conditions for entry into a political race. However, my sense is that if you want to talk about the perniciousness of money in politics, then campaign expenditures are really just the tip of the iceberg. If you look, for example, at my book that I wrote with Michael Graetz of Yale Law School, Death By a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth, we have a chapter in that book called “Money, Money, Money” in which we go into the ways money played a role in the repeal of the estate tax. If you wanted to list the ways in which money was effective, campaign contributions were only a tiny part of the story. By far the most important part was the money that over the past two decades has been poured by the anti-tax lobby into think tanks, into moving opinion among elites by hammering out alternatives to the New Deal consensus that triumphed in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

Do you think those efforts have changed how the Democratic Party approaches taxes as well?

I think they have indeed. I think the Democratic Party since the 1980s has been under the influence of the Democratic Leadership Council, being engaged in a project of reinventing itself that has been deeply unhealthy for the Democratic Party and for opposition politics in America. They have been seduced by what Dick Morris refers to as “triangulation.” This is the notion that in a two party system if you figure out what your opponent is pushing, and you offer a light version of that, you will get some of your opponent’s votes at the center, and your grassroots supporters might grumble, but they will have no other place to go.

The problem with triangulation is that it is good tactics but bad strategy, because once your opponent figures out what you are doing, they just keep moving the goal posts. Thus, the Republicans have mainstreamed what have previously been fringe issues, such as estate tax reform. Triangulation can work in the short run, as it did with Bill Clinton in the case of welfare reform, but in the long run it tends to mean that your platform becomes your opponent’s previous platform.

Many have commented that the Democratic victory in 2006 was not due to the Democratic Party’s own successes, but rather, Republican failures. Do you believe that Democrats have solved the problems that have been plaguing the party in recent years?

I think the implication of the question is correct. The Democrats didn’t win in 2006; the Republicans lost. It was a referendum on the mismanagement of Iraq. If you look at what the Democratic candidates are now proposing, they haven’t overcome this deficit. On national security questions, they haven’t proposed any alternative to the Bush doctrine. In domestic politics, you would be hard-pressed to name me three of four policies that Hillary or Obama stand for.

The Internet is becoming a more and more important tool in modern campaigns. How is the web changing democratic participation in America today? What are the positive and negative aspects of this new technology?

I haven’t studied it in a systematic way, so while I think that there are positive and negative dimensions to it, I don’t know how they net out. A positive dimension is that it gives all kinds of people access to public debate with minimal resources. In that sense it is a very egalitarian thing. A negative aspect is that it can be a forum for extreme attack groups to organize with like-minded people, and it’s not altogether clear how healthy that is.

In your book Containment, you propose a policy of containment, similar to the one employed by the United States during the Cold War, to combat global terrorism. The United States’ containment policy began from almost the very beginning of the Cold War. Is it too late for the U.S. to initiate such a policy? What difficulties will the U.S. need to overcome to put in place an effective containment policy combating terrorism?

I don’t think it’s too late. I think it is inevitable that we will need to employ containment to combat terrorism, because the alternatives don’t work. We did it successfully in Libya, for example. I think that there is clearly going to have to be a containment strategy for post-occupation Iraq. It’s just that we are making it vastly more difficult for ourselves by engaging in the policies that we have, which undermine containment. Global containment differs from containment in the Cold War in that it has to be worked through international institutions and has to operate with regional allies in the neighborhood of states where terrorist groups are located. I think that the Baker Commission was exactly right that we can’t do that without cooperating with local powers.

Of all the current 2008 presidential candidates, both Republican and Democratic, who do you believe has the most comprehensive and potentially effective plan to combat terrorism?

I don’t see anybody having it. I think the Democrats will continue to follow the strategy of why say anything when the Republicans are busy tripping over their own feet. On the Republican side, we have people like McCain saying that we should stay the course with more surges. The saner Republican voices, like Senator Chuck Hagel, have decided not to run.

The past year has seen a significant reduction in support among the American public for the war in Iraq, and more generally, the proposition of promoting democracy abroad. Do you think it is possible to rebuild a consensus over U.S. efforts abroad?

Not until our policies change. George Kennan, the original architect of containment, opposed the war in Vietnam because he said that if you go to war over a peripheral interest, your support at home is going to erode before your adversaries’ willingness to fight disappears, because for you it’s a peripheral interest while for them it’s a vial interest. He predicted what actually happened in Vietnam, and now we see the same thing going on in Iraq. To the degree that American policy includes going to war when we don’t have vital interests at stake, I think it’s inconceivable that any administration will be able to build public support for that.

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