Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America

by Lee Drutman

“Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015.”

Many of the initial dismal verdicts sprang from the unexpected election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States.

Only one other time in American history has the party system resembled this arrangement: the 1860s, when the United States fought a civil war and then tried to recover from one.

Actually 1800 as well

Finally, a fully divided two-party system is completely unworkable when the partisan divide is over the character of national identity, as it is today.

At the height of the hidden four-party system, from the late 1960s to mid-1980s, American democracy was far more responsive and flexible than today, and landmark legislation flowed out of Washington, solving some big public problems.

Or maybe creating them!

Politics is about conflict. It has to be. Issues of widespread agreement are not political issues. Political issues are issues where we disagree. And since modern mass democracy depends on partisan competition, parties need to differentiate themselves. This is healthy.

We just need more than two.

Like sexes?

We need political conflicts that are less predictable and more complex. At its core, this is what multiparty democracy can give us.

The 50 shades of gray morality …

We all innately seek out facts that prove us right and ignore those that might prove us wrong. And we care about self-preservation: we desperately want to preserve our jobs, our relationships, and our sense of self-worth. And when any of these are threatened, we dig in and fight harder.

men were angels,” James Madison wrote in Federalist no. 51, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”8 But since men and women are not angels, we need government institutions. We are all prone to the same flaws of our mental hardware. Good institutions elevate our inner angels; bad institutions feed our inner devils.

Thus ALL institutions must be limited!

Good institutions

Define "good"

encouraging us to seek compromises to hard problems. Bad institutions push us into our narrow corners, making us certain we are right and they are wrong

Ergo, it's all relative! So what does good/bad mean?

As a lifelong Democrat, I tend to see the Republican Party as driven by radical extremists and primarily responsible for the escalating breakdown of democratic fairness.9

Have they ever tried to approve infantacide?

The only solution is to de-escalate, and the only way to do that is to split apart the parties.

And since that is the ONLY solution it is a "compromisd" because?

My previous book, The Business of America Is Lobbying (2015), asked why corporate lobbying had taken over Washington, DC, and how we might reduce corporate America’s disproportionate influence.

Because government became too powerful …

“drain the swamp,”

The swamp is primarily the admim state

It soon became clear that the winner-take-all electoral system and the two-party system it had produced was indeed at the heart of the problem.

Unlimited government is the heart !

Consensus is impossible.

I’ll also discuss why multiparty democracy is better equipped to respond to the rise of far-right populism.

And ar left statism?

But here’s why we should focus on political institutions first. All of these problems will require some kind of government action.

These two parties are now older than most of the world’s democracies.

For most of their history, they were incredibly broad, big-tent national coalitions. This meant that they rarely stood for much at the national level.

The democrats were the party of slavery and jim crow for 100 years!

In 2010, America became a true two-party system, and precisely in the way the Framers feared: two geographically oriented parties, each seeing the other as the enemy.

Or maybe 1964!

A healthy and stable democracy depends on healthy politics.

And healthy politics depend on shared morals

Democracies “die” when the winners become so anxious about ever losing that they capture neutral “referees” (like the press and the courts), deny the legitimacy of their political opponents, tolerate and encourage violence, undermine basic civil rights, and shut down unfriendly media.

With more categories and more fluid identities, we become more confused and more uncertain. This is good: it prevents us from seeing our side as the righteous and natural majority. Complexity forces us to think harder. Doubt opens us up to compromise. More parties brings in more diversity of perspective.

Clearly Satan is right! Any clairity on right and wrong must be confused!

Citizens who live in them are happier, and more satisfied with the state of democracy.

"Happy and satisfied" ... Maybe "drunk and stupid" animL house rules!

When experts have advised on constitutional design for developing democracies, they’ve never recommended the American system of government.

Eggs are bad, we're out of oil, and hinking the USSR is going away is nuts!

The problem is our two-party system. It is the core structural force driving a doom loop of toxic politics.

Schattschneider was also a frustrated liberal. Though schooled in the progressive reformist tradition, he was much more comfortable than the Progressives were with both the idea of power and the prospects for concentrating it in political parties.

Today, parties are too far apart. But this wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, the problem was that the two parties were too similar.

“Either major party, when in power, is ill-equipped to organize its members in the legislative and the executive branches into a government held together and guided by the party program.”

The parties would rationalize, nationalize, and modernize American democracy. Voters would finally have clear and meaningful choices on Election Day.

“The most important distinction in modern political philosophy, the distinction between democracy and dictatorship, can be made best in terms of party politics”

Division requires disagreement. Party democracy involves conflict—it must; otherwise the parties become indistinguishable, and elections turn meaningless. And one-party democracy is not really democracy.

In the Progressives’ telling, both parties and party politicians had no redeeming virtues and could only mislead and dissemble. But both “the people” and the expert scientific administrators were unbiased, and thus had unique insight into the Truth. Progressives believed the public interest depended on disinterested citizens coming together, without “politics” and self-interest. Once everyone put country above party, expertise and common sense would align, and wisdom would prevail over petty greed.

Because the Progressives were fundamentally uncomfortable with power, they lacked a theory of power. And without a theory of power, they didn’t have a workable theory of governance. Like the Framers, they thought it was possible to avoid parties. Like the Framers, they were wrong.

“We must remember that the one election when our parties stood irrevocably on questions of principle was the election of 1860.”57

And 1800

Like communist zealots who argue that the problem with communism is that true communism has never been tried, believers in a more responsible two-party system cling to a similarly unfalsifiable idealism. American political parties can never be strong enough, at least not in a two-party system.

This adds up to a paradox: We need some division for parties to provide meaningful alternatives and to give voters power to send strong signals. But too much division and the stakes start to feel too high. Politics becomes toxic. Partisan conflict overwhelms every issue, spreading even beyond politics, and democracy deteriorates.

The American experience suggests that in a two-party system it’s impossible to engineer that “just right” balance. Somewhere in between those extremes there was an era of reasonable balance, when parties were neither too indistinct nor too distinct. In retrospect, that era lasted from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, when American democracy was at its most productive and responsive

Moreover, Lowi argued, now that the era of big national government was underway, perhaps it was actually impossible to collapse all the meaningful alternatives into just two programs.

Republicans were actually slightly more supportive than Democrats, with about four in five Republicans supporting the bill, as compared to two in three Democrats.

So began a great reordering of American politics. The two major parties expanded and nationalized partisan political conflict until it became the totalizing partisan warfare of today.

previous few years as an opportunity to exploit.10 Perhaps in an alternate version of history, Kennedy deferred to his more cautious advisors and didn’t make the call. Perhaps Nixon, who was closer to King than Kennedy was at the time, made the call and won the pivotal support from black voters, and a Republican president presided over the civil rights revolution.11 Republicans then became the party of civil rights, and American politics would have looked very different.

The modern metamorphosis of American politics begins with the transformative civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But it has antecedents in the New Deal, when the Democratic Party successfully fused together a coalition of northern liberals and progressives and southern conservatives.

The resulting devil’s bargain was a kind of coded language and imagery, sometimes called “dog-whistle politics.” On

The dog whistle myth

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In 1988, the parties were still capacious enough that the arch-segregationist David Duke entered the Democratic Party’s presidential primary, alongside civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

linked up with the long-held conservative view that government is too powerful, and this linkage was what made evangelicals active.”

If liberal elites had their way, America would become a secular wasteland of “feminism,” “homosexuality,” and “abortion-on-demand.” Christians had to join the battle to protect their great heritage.