The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

KNight by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel.

The core thing I mean, this goes back. There was a political scientist, a Frenchman named Maurice Duverger. Oh, Duverger. I'm so sick of that guy.

Mid 20th century. And he put forth what political scientists call a law, Duverger's law, that says if you have a system of electoral rules in which you have single member districts.

That combination, plurality voting and single member districts tends to lead to, this is why it's not really a law. It's just a kind of a rule of thumb, tends to lead to stable two party systems and makes it very hard for a kind of equilibrium.

So the intuition in our politics is that in order to win, you have to keep your side intact and fracture the opposition. Both sides see that they have to keep their sides intact, fracture the opposition. That leads to two teams, which we call parties.

The story is a lot of people - Well, tell RFK Jr. that. They're keeping him out of the debates. A lot of people are - more so now than ever because we're in a very ideologically polarized time. People are sincerely motivated in what they're doing.

And he's the author of Why We're Polarized.

Ezra Klein, columnist at New York Times, host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, the author of Why We're Polarized.

This feels like clockwork orange.

So there has been for a very long time this idea that when the government increases spending or cuts taxes and the deficit increases, that it leaves you with fewer resources, like you're less able to respond to a crisis in the future.

If the Republicans are successful in pushing these tax cuts through, we are going to be living, he said, on a shoestring for decades to come because of the increases in the deficit.

Congress authorized bill after bill, fiscal package after fiscal package, $2.2 trillion, $900 billion, $1.9 trillion, $5 trillion in the span of 12 months, John.

You cannot just take out the money bazooka and go wild and expect no consequences.

All of the dollars that banks have at the Federal Reserve are kept in accounts called reserve accounts at the Fed. The Fed pays interest on those.

Ladies and gentlemen, Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us.

I wrote this book, The Sum of Us. And the central story was when many white townspeople officials decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them.

Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us.

Also the author of Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Renee Dressa, Associate Research Professor ... and also the author of Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Gutenberg Bible and done.

and Sora Abamari, U.S. editor of Unheard and author of Tyranny, Inc.

the fabulous historian, Bon Vivant, gentleman and scholar. Bon Vivant. John Meacham, presidential historian, author of And There Was Light, a biography of Lincoln.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance talk a good ballgame. They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk.

The Republican Party doesn't walk the walk. The judges they've appointed to the Supreme Court and other courts are quite anti-worker, anti-union.

Donald Trump says, I'm for the nation's forgotten men and women, but he didn't raise a finger to increase the minimum wage.

He says he's all for coal miners, but his administration actually weakened standards for safety for coal miners.

He said, I'm fighting hard for coal miners, yet the number of coal mining jobs dropped by 25% when he was president.

I think the really important thing for voters to understand is it's not a problem of our individual will. It's not like we have a problem because we're not voting for third parties. Our institutions do not create space for third parties to play a significant beneficial role.

Instead, it punishes voters when they vote for third parties rather than rewards them. And the question becomes, how do we restructure our institutions to change that?

One of the things that we have to get over is American exceptionalism. The idea that there was a group of geniuses who happened to meet at a particular time and place who solved all the problems of democracy. That's not true.

They actually messed up in pretty significant ways. The system that they constructed isn't the system that we have, or at least the ones that they thought they constructed. And so it's really important to recognize that.

The central lesson of that tour - there's two central lessons of the tour. There are two threats to democracy, too few parties like the U.S., too many parties.

Ben is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money, on economics and directed and produced the feature film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.

He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money. You got to get it. It's a fascinating read and Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which is the documentary about this industry.

I have written a book, which in the US, it's a title you might like. It's called How Not to Be a Politician.

The book that I wrote was originally written for Filipino citizens, but it was literally a warning call. For everyone, because it, because this was triggered by the public information ecosystem that we live in, which rewards corruption.

And in a book during World War II called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he said, you know, the great achievement of capitalism was not making more silk stockings for queens, the queens of England, the queens of Europe, but bringing them in reach of factory girls.

Mamie Eisenhower, ladies and gentlemen. This is a man - Look at this. At home in his study. He could be doing anything. It could be Candy Crush. And in that moment, it is a book on Mamie Eisenhower. Blurred by Claire Booth Luce. What?

This, by the way, is also - this is the complete and unabridged.

This book is written by Alden Hatch. It was published in - Let's see. It was published in 1954. It was big in 54. Had to be. Had to be.

Her name is Sarah Smarsh. She's a journalist. She's the author of Bone of the Bone, Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

This really feels like a moment when maybe my message about class and the way that we need to center it and discuss it as an identity unto itself is really critical right now.