About the Authors

Lee Drutman is a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (2020) and The Business of America is Lobbying (2015), winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award, given for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.” He is also the cohost of the podcast Politics in Question and a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, and he writes regularly for FiveThirtyEight. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, NBC Think, and Foreign Policy, among many other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Brown University. In 2021, he was named one of Washington’s Most Influential People by Washingtonian magazine.

Jonathan D. Cohen is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Program Officer for American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the lead staffer on the Academy’s Commission on Reimagining Our Economy, and he works on the implementation of the recommendations in Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. He is the author of For a Dollar and a Dream: The History of State Lotteries (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the editor of Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen (with June Skinner Sawyers, 2019) and All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States (with David G. Schwartz, 2018). His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Vox, The Hill, and other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.

Yuval Levin is the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. He served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush, was Executive Director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and has served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels. Interviewed frequently on radio and television, he has also published essays and articles in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (2020). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Norman J. Ornstein is Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He has been involved in political reform for decades, particularly campaign finance, election reform, and House and Senate reform. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He served as an election analyst for CBS News for thirty years, and frequently appears on other outlets to discuss American politics. His articles and opinion pieces have been published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Politico, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for The Atlantic. He is the author of numerous books, including the New York Times and Washington Post bestsellers One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann, 2017) and It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (with Thomas E. Mann, 2012). He holds a Ph.D. and a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota.