BREAKING THE TWO-PARTY DOOM LOOP – Lee Drutman

Watch American politics for any period of time, and a few words will come to your mind: impotence. Corruption. Paralysis. Doom.  Lee Drutman believes you’re right to feel this way.  He opens the book by pointing out that our sense of incipient doom is present in our television, social media and books. It penetrates casual conversations and politics. It even influences how we parent our children.

Yes, income inequality and economic decay are big deals. Sure, the culture wars and immigration matter. Although they don’t matter the way the blood-and-soil chanters of Charlottesville think. Drutman is looking past Planet Trump and his fellow travelers. This problem is bigger than him.  It started before him and it’s not going anywhere, even if Trump never holds elected office again.

The enemy in Breaking The Two-Party Doom Loop is what political scientists call winner-take-all politics expressed in a two-party system. That two party system? Currently it’s Republicans on the “right” and Democrats on the “left”.  In every stage of American politics since 1790, we’ve had two dominant parties. This has been true even when third parties rose, fell or otherwise upset this enduring balance.  Within an election cycle or two, things always stabilize back to this norm. We get two parties that represent our effective choices. They form the whole range of acceptable views in politics – a concept political scientists call the Overton window.

The point?  Our two-party system is not preordained.  It’s not a natural result of the democratic process, it’s not static, and it’s not enough.  It is a result of choices our leaders and electorate have made over two and a half centuries. There must be alternatives.

“Two-party winner-take-all politics is fueling a calamitous zero-sum toxic partisanship.  But there’s a way out.  America can become a multiparty democracy and break the destructive binary.”

In the hyper-partisanship we experience, compromise is a dirty word. Every fight is apocalyptic. It threatens what Drutman calls a “doom loop”.  It reinforces itself; provocations from one side, then reactions that only heighten tensions. This makes it harder for each side to de-escalate.  A multi-party democracy that eases these tensions is Drutman’s proposed way out.  He believes it would allow us to represent more views in our politics. Fluid coalitions could form based on the issues of the day. Compromise to be both easier and more easily rewarded by the public.

WHY IS A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM SO DANGEROUS FOR THE U.S.?

America isn’t a parliamentary democracy. That’s where the party or coalition of parties that wins the most votes controls the legislature and, thus, heads the executive branch. This head of the executive branch is usually called a Prime Minister.  We can have, and often do have, a Congress split between one party ruling the House and another ruling the Senate. We can also have a Congress of one party and a President of another. All the while, the courts can also be controlled by a different party than Congress or the presidency.

We have checks and balances in our system. These are ways that each branch of government can block the moves of another. This way, no one branch can exercise all power.  This slows our system down considerably. A party that wins the most votes doesn’t automatically get to enact its agenda.  That’s great if you consider such a government to be a boon for your own freedom. But it’s also a huge problem if you want your government to get things done. The same is true if you’re one of those people who votes for a party and then actually expects results.

That two-party system, where the parties represent two sets of consistently different regional groupings and broad ideological views, is what we have now. It’s what Drutman argues is most dangerous to have in our system.  When there are only two choices like this, it contributes to an us-vs-them mentality. This encourages us to treat politics as warfare, or as a zero-sum game (if you win, I must lose, and vice versa).  This will inevitably lead to paralysis in a system that already slows down government action and legislation. 

Our system of elections makes this worse, too.  Our voting system is a winner-take-all or first-past-the-post system. In any given election for a seat (such as congressperson or senator), there’s one seat at stake for that particular district. The person with the most votes wins that single seat.  To Americans, this sounds obvious – how else would you run an election?   There are ways.  We’ll get to them.

A multi-party system is the goal here. That’s the secret sauce that Drutman believes will help heal our broken democracy. He writes that the lack of it is unique to the US among the advanced democracies.   Until recently – thanks to our age of hyper-partisanship – the US actually had what Drutman calls a “hidden four-party system“.  The author breaks down the four groups like this:

1) Liberal Democrats in the North, Upper Midwest, and West Coast;

2) Liberal Republicans in the North, Upper Midwest, and West Coast;

3) Conservative Democrats in the South and rural areas of America;

4) Conservative Republicans in the South and rural areas of America.

None of these four groups had a majority, or even consistently dominant influence in their own parties.  So coalitions formed between them based on issues and the national mood, and changed as needed.  Compromise and “bipartisanship” were relatively accepted, commonplace, and easy compared to the teeth-pulling you see today.

WHY DOES WINNER-TAKE-ALL VOTING SUCK?

Because in an election for a House seat, for instance, getting 49% of the vote does not get you 49% of the power if the other side gets 51%.  It’s all or nothing. If you consistently can expect to get less than a majority in an election for that district, you’re almost better off not trying.  Your party stops spending money there.  You stop trying to recruit quality candidates. Why should you? No one in that area is willing to put their life on hold, and reputation on the line, to go on a suicide mission.  This is part of why so many House seats go uncontested. The GOP or Dem incumbents will run unopposed because there’s no point in attempting to topple them in a district that is bound re-elect them.  Huge parts of districts never see representation that cares about their interests. 

A system where only parties that can get 51% of the vote can achieve power is a system that only has room for two parties. Both have to be large enough to clear that percentage a reasonable amount of time.  This forces other parties into irrelevance or stillbirth.  That’s because at the time the founders wrote the Constitution, they used the British parliament as a model. There was no other system of running elections.

HOW DID WE GET THE PARTY SYSTEM WE HAVE NOW?

Both the Democrats and the Republicans form a coalition of different interests, agreeing to compete under the same banner.  The evangelical Christians, blue-collar rural workers, prominent businessmen, and supporters of high military spending and Mexican border walls are not necessarily the same people. Often, they aren’t.  But they all form part of the modern Republican party. All agree to support a common set of candidates in the hope that their priorities will get met if they team up.  Similarly, a coalition of urban professionals, young college graduates, teachers, union workers, black Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ Americans, progressives, socialists and other groups form the Democratic Party.  They all gamble that together they can get their needs met and their candidates will represent them all well enough.

Drutman discusses the decline of labor power in the Democratic party along with the decline of Democrats talking about working-class economic issues and more about general questions of justice and fairness for racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities.  His analysis rings true, but folks like Thomas Frank do it better in books like Listen, Liberal.  

Meanwhile, the conservative movement turned toward questions of the culture war. This began during the years of Newt Gingrich leading the House. It continued through George Bush and the rise of the Tea Party. The author of this book argues that most of our political fights were over “national identity” rather than “who gets what”.  That’s true.  I’d argue that’s changing, though. Income inequality rises, climate patterns change, and capitalism shows its frayed edges. All this allows economic issues to take center stage again.

Drutman cites Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who wrote the book How Democracies Die, to discuss why this kind of polarization of our politics between two hostile parties can contribute toward losing “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” in our politics.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR OUR POLITICS?

Maybe I don’t have to give great detail about how this plays out in our halls of power today.  If you watch national news when Congress tries to pass legislation, you’ve seen it.  Anything with less than 60 votes gets killed by the opposition party’s filibuster.  Hardly anyone reaches out to form workable compromises. Few form lasting coalitions across party lines.  President Obama proved the futility of even trying when he attempted to reform our healthcare system. And remember – he failed even with a massive majority in the Senate and House.   Obama felt compelled to compromise with himself. He went with a health plan inspired by the conservative Heritage Foundation and GOP Governor (now Senator) Mitt Romney. The plan ignored or cut left-leaning ideas like single-payer universal healthcare.  And despite this, he still got zero Republican senators to back him on Obamacare.

As I write this, President Joe Biden is trying to navigate legislation through a Senate with a 50-50 split. There’s also a razor-thin Democratic majority in the House on the other side of the Capitol.  Even though we have the GOP solidly on the right and the Dems on the (relative) left, the parties range from Romney to Josh Hawley, from Joe Manchin to Bernie Sanders.  There’s no agreement on fundamental issues.  There’s a filibuster that prevents anything with less than 60 votes in the Senate from passing.  No one feels like the process works for anyone. Compromise is an exercise in futility, and many feel we’re a couple bad votes away from disaster at any given time.  The doom loop is well underway.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

Drutman sketches out a “Save American Democracy Act” to frame his proposals:

1) Single-winner ranked-choice voting for Senate

2) Multi-winner ranked-choice voting for the House

3) Increase the size of the House

4) End Congressional primaries

5) Ranked-choice voting for president

Ranked-choice voting is the principal solution put forth in this book, and at its core, it makes a lot of sense – but it does upend a lot of what Americans are used to seeing at the polls.

You don’t just pick one candidate when you vote in a ranked-choice election.  You literally rank the candidates – first, second, third, and so on.  It’s actually quite easy as a voter, we’re all capable of it.  The counting is what gets a little trickier, but bear with me.  If anyone gets a majority of votes (50% or more), they win the seat.  But if no one gets a majority when votes are first counted, the candidate you chose second starts to matter.  We start narrowing the field by eliminating the candidate who got the fewest number of votes.  The votes awarded to that person go to the candidate those voters ranked second. Suddenly, someone who didn’t have a majority before might have one now.  If they do, hooray, they win!  If not, you eliminate the next lowest-voted candidate, and reassign their votes to their second choice winners, and so on, until you have a majority winner.

Multi-winner districts are the second key element of Drutman’s plan.  Several countries, like Ireland and Australia, use this system in some way now.  It’s sometimes called proportional representation.

What we have now in the United States, for members of the House of Representatives and in many state legislatures, are single-winner districts.  Each state is divided into congressional districts. The states get anywhere from one at-large district for tiny Vermont to over fifty for gigantic California. Each district is supposed to have a roughly equal number of people in it, and each district elects one congressperson.  As such, each election leads to a single-winner for that district.  Pretty straightforward, right?  But its drawbacks are obvious when you think about how it reinforces the two party system.  In any given district, even if you use ranked-choice voting, one group of voters gets all the representation from that congressperson. Meanwhile, the other voters gain no real representation of their interests.  They’re shut out.  This is why we can have a system where 5% or 10% or 20% of the country leans toward a third party, but that party holds no seats in Congress. That might seem fair enough if you look at it simply as a matter of following the rules set out in elections, but remember: these rules aren’t set in stone.  Multi-winner districts help you do that.  Don’t divide America into 435 Congressional Districts with one winner in each district.  Divide it into, say, 100 or fewer districts across the country, and elect five congresspersons from each.  You could use ranked-choice voting on this setup too, and list your first, second, third choices and so on.  You might get two or three from the largest parties. But third parties would win elections under this system, and find a voice in legislatures.  People make the rules after all, and people can change them.

Multi-winner systems and ranked-choice voting would allow for more parties to win elections. They’d allow parties to split from unwieldy, incoherent coalitions into coherent ones.  The factions of the Republican and Democratic parties could amicably split. Then, they could represent themselves honestly.  AOC will no longer have to stand in the same party with Joe Manchin.  No one has to resent being part of a party that won’t listen to their agenda. Instead, they can split off and win representation on their own terms.  It will lead to more choices, more room for compromise, and more honesty.  

But how else can we make American democracy more responsive and genuine?  By expanding our artificially small House of Representatives, for one.  It’s been locked at 435 members since 1929 for pretty short-sighted reasons. Meanwhile, our national population has increased a great deal. Those new people have to be represented by the same number of representatives. And so each representative goes from representing 30,000 people to over 750,000 people.  Drutman proposes increasing it by a little over 50%.  The more the merrier.  Smaller countries get away with more. The the more representatives we have, the more they can represent all their constituents, not just the wealthy and powerful.

The more anti-democratic impulses of our Founders are not something we have to live with.  Our average citizen’s level of literacy, education, and political participation may not be what we hope for. But it is still well beyond what many of those Founders envisioned.  The Senate should be completely restructured as a proportional body. Either that, or we should disband it.  It is a roadblock both to popular will and to governing a large nation.  Drutman also proposes other reforms like abolishing the Electoral College and ending congressional primaries.  The way that abolishing the Electoral College reflects popular will is probably obvious – but primaries?  Shouldn’t we be able to vote for who leads the Democrats or Republicans?  Maybe it makes sense here, where there are only two functional choices. But in a multiparty democracy someone who disagrees with a party nominee can much more easily run on their own, in their own party, up until election day.  They don’t need to pass through that primary gate in order to get the attention of most voters.

WHO DOESN’T WANT US TO KNOW THIS, AND WHY?

Drutman doesn’t really call out who benefits from this doom-loop, or name the culprits that ultimately keep us from breaking out of it.  Maybe I should, instead.

We know that the Republicans and the Democrats have plenty to gain from being the only two viable parties in the United States.  That much is obvious.  A system where dissenters, outsiders, and malcontents break out and run on their own platforms threatens the major parties.

But when looking to assign broader societal blame, we should ask who benefits – or as the Romans said, cui bono? What corporations get to engage in criminal or destructive behavior when there’s no consensus on challenging them?  What class gets to keep more and more of its money by ensuring that the only law-making consists of cutting taxes and confirming friendly judges?  Which media organizations, built to pander to well-established audiences and poke open wounds in our society? Would their plans be thrown asunder if politics involved shifting, bold ideas instead of trench warfare?  Cui bono?

The vision of multiparty American democracy expressed in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop is worth fighting for. At least, it is as long as our system resembles the one we have now.  We can also look to existing countries that use similar rules, and that believe themselves to be successful democracies. This can help us to see where these reforms could still fail to fix our problems.  Extremists can still attain power under these other systems.  The rights of minorities and workers can still be infringed.  Governments can fail to build coalitions. This can still lead to paralysis or election after election, as we’ve recently seen in places like Israel.

So what else ails us?  What more radical cures might we need to whip up? Keep up with PROLE ACADEMY as we explore what else is out there.

TIRED OF READING?

Check out the great video series by Youtuber CGP Grey on Voting Systems of the Animal Kingdom.  He elegantly, adorably explains the problem with first-past-the-post voting and gerrymandering, how they inevitably lead to two-party unhappiness, and walks you through the alternative ways to vote.  I’ve referred to this series for years, and it’s always brought me delight to share it.