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

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Lee Drutman 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Drutman, Lee, 1976 author.

Title: Breaking the two-party doom loop : the case for multiparty democracy

in America / by Lee Drutman.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009495 | ISBN 9780190913854 (hardback) |

ISBN 9780190913861 (uPDF) | ISBN 9780190913878 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Political partiesUnited States. | DemocracyUnited States.

| United StatesPolitics and governmentPhilosophy.

Classification: LCC JK2265 .D78 2020 | DDC 324.273dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009495

For my daughters, Elsa and Chava. May they grow up in a thriving and healthy democracy.

Parents wonder whether their children will still grow up in a democracy. Gallows political humor about the collapse of the republic creeps into ordinary conversation. No longer a shining model for the world, American democracy today strikes a more cautionary note. An anxious pessimism dominates.

By every expert judgment, the United States is slipping. In late 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from full democracy to flawed democracy, and gave it the same ranking as Italy.

The August 2018 Bright Line Watch survey of 679 political scientists concluded: Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015. Let me repeat: a one-in-six chance of democratic breakdown. Thats like rolling a die and hoping it doesnt land on Hungary.

Many of the initial dismal verdicts sprang from the unexpected election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. But as I conclude writing, two years into his presidency, collective wisdom has evolved: Trump may not so much be the problem. He is instead the symptom of something much bigger.

This is a book about that something much bigger. Its a book about how our political system fell into this downward spirala doom loop of toxic politics. Its a story that requires thinking bigabout the nature of political conflict, about broad changes in American society over many decades, and, most of all, about the failures of our political institutions.

This is a book about whats gone wrong. But its also about what can go right. I have a solution to match the diagnosis. Two-party winner-take-all politics is fueling a calamitous zero-sum toxic partisanship. But theres a way out. America can become a multiparty democracy and break the destructive binary.

America now has a genuine, fully sorted, two-party system. This is a new and significant development. While weve always had a two-party system in name, for most of our history the two parties have been capacious, incoherent, and overlapping. This overlap lent a certain stability to American national politics, because it worked with, rather than against, our compromise-oriented political institutions.

This new era is qualitatively different: two distinct, national party coalitions organized around two distinct visions of American national identity, each claiming to represent a true majority. 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.

A fully divided two-party system without any overlap is probably unworkable in any democracy, given what it does to our minds. It leads us to see our fellow citizens not as political opponents to politely disagree with but as enemies to delegitimize and destroy. It turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield where we must win and they must lose.

A fully divided two-party system is decidedly unworkable in America, given our political institutions. We have separation-of-powers government designed to make narrow majority rule difficult to impossible. And yet we have a party system where both sides attempt to impose narrow majority rule on each other. The mismatch is unsustainable.

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. This raises the stakes impossibly high and makes compromise impossible. It poses an existential threat to the future of American democracy.

Multiparty democracy is a big idea. But it is not a radical proposal. Almost all the worlds democracies are multiparty democracies, and the vast majority hold elections using proportional representation. The United States, with just two parties and an antiquated first-past-the-post (single-winner plurality) voting system, is the global outlier.

Multiparty democracies have consistently generated stable, moderate, compromise-oriented policymaking; higher voter turnout; more satisfied citizens; and better representation of political and ethnic minorities. In multiparty democracies, parties do not claim to represent true majorities. They promise to represent and bargain on behalf of the different voters and issues they represent. In multiparty democracies, coalitions are more fluid and flexible, built around compromisejust as the Framers of the American Constitution intended.

Multiparty democracy is not even new to the United States. As I will argue, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s, the national two-party system contained a hidden four-party system: liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans in the culturally liberal Northeast and Upper Midwest, the West Coast, and the big cities in between, and conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans in the rural, traditional parts of the country and the South. Each represented its own cluster of values and issue positions. None had a majority. All had to bargain. Enemies could become allies; allies could become enemies. The fate of democracy didnt hang in the balance each election.

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.

The system began to collapse into two much more distinct parties in the 1990s, as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats dwindled into irrelevance. Both parties lined up into distinct teams, with more and more centralized leadership, and national politics took on a new fierceness. Some vestiges of the old system hung around into the 2000s, helping to broker a few remaining bipartisan deals here and there. In 2010, when a Tea Party wave swept away all but a few of the last remaining moderates in Congress, America became the fully sorted two-party democracy we have today.