Monday, December 12, 2022

Toward a Multiparty Democracy

While the recent midterm elections were a welcome relief for American democracy, our political system remains mired in a toxic partisanship that is destroying the American government’s ability to act in the national interest.  As Lee Drutman has cogently written, the United States government has for the last thirty years been in a two-party doom loop that will only get worse as long as our electoral rules strangle the possibility of a multi-party democracy.

With this post, I am beginning a series on the restoration of functional democracy by reforming the electoral process to move us toward a multi-party political system.

Political science experts now recognize that a national two-party system like the United States’ — in which both parties are ideologically sorted and non-overlapping — inevitably devolves into the kind of venomous rancor that now dominates our politics.  As Drutman writes:

Once the parties polarize in a two-party system, polarization becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic.  And the more parties take strongly opposing positions, the more different they appear.  The more different the parties appear, the more the other party comes to feel like a genuine “threat,” demanding vigilance in response.  The more extreme the other party seems, the greater the need to defeat it.  The more extreme the other party, the more vindicated your side feels in taking strong, even radical, action in response.  Both sides fall into their own separate worlds of facts, full of reinforcing us-versus-them narratives.  The more totalizing partisanship becomes, the more totalizing it grows.  (p 27)

It has not always been so.  While the United States has had only two major parties for most of its political history, until the last thirty years, Drutman writes, 

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.  (p 2)

From the early 1950s until the mid-1980s, for instance, the two political parties actually hid within them four overlapping elements:

  • liberal Democrats in the cities, upper-Midwest, and West Coast,
  • conservative Democrats in the South and rural areas,
  • liberal, establishment Republicans in the Northeast
  • conservative Republicans in the West.

None of these groups had a majority and so they had to work with each other and compromise, creating shifting coalitions to get things done.  Famously, for instance, liberal Democrats teamed with liberal Republicans to pass the Civil Rights legislations of 1964 and 1965.  Congresspeople were careful not to alienate their opponent on one issue because they might be needed to vote together on the next issue.  What was effectively a multi-party system in American politics lasted until the mid-1980s.

Following the Civil Rights legislation that brought an end to Jim Crow, however, the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” began a realignment of the parties as the Democratic Party became more urban and more diverse while the Republicans became more rural and white.  By the mid-1990s, liberals had largely fled the Republican Party and conservatives had fled the Democratic Party.  The parties had become ideologically sorted with little overlap.  Party membership had now as much to do with identity as it did with political viewpoints.  And so began the doom loop of toxic partisanship.

Readers of this blog will know that I have been extremely critical of the anti-democratic tendencies of the Republican Party over the last fifteen years.  In writing about toxic partisanship, I am not about to engage in blaming both parties equally for the dangerous democratic failures of the last decade.  But I no longer believe that we can get out of this mess by trying to destroy the Republican Party (as tempting as that possibility may be to my inner child).  Rather, we need to get out of the doom loop of toxic partisanship altogether.  Fortunately, electoral reform that could be instituted by an act of Congress without constitutional amendment — Ranked Choice Voting, multi-member House districts, reforming primaries, and enlarging the House of Representatives — would encourage multi-party democracy and provide a way out of our toxic politics.

The next posts will begin to explore what that might look like.

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In these comments I am hoping to encourage civil and respectful conversation among folks with different political viewpoints. In this age of polarization, I realize that will be difficult. But those of us who disagree with each other are not enemies, but political opponents. Our willingness to enter into cooperative dialog is an essential part of a vibrant democracy.(Comments are currently only only available since Jan 1, 2019. If you'd like to comment on an earlier post, go to the most recent post and request commenting be turned on for the date you want.)