America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared
As a third party supporter, i must admit a personal desire to see the two party system destroyed..... but this really is a very fascinating read.
America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared
John Adams worried that “a division
of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great
political evil.” And that’s exactly what has come to pass.
January 2, 2020
Author of Breaking the Two-Party
Doom Loop
Katie
Martin / The Atlantic
George Washington’s farewell address
is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: “The alternate
domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,
natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has
perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” John
Adams, Washington’s successor, similarly worried that “a division of the
republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political
evil.”
America has now become that dreaded
divided republic. The existential menace is as foretold, and it is breaking the
system of government the Founders put in place with the Constitution.
Though America’s two-party system
goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two
parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms.
Until then, the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them
that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty
democracy could work inside the two-party system. No more. America now has just
two parties, and that’s it.
The theory that guided Washington
and Adams was simple, and widespread at the time. If a consistent partisan
majority ever united to take control of the government, it would use its power
to oppress the minority. The fragile consent of the governed would break down,
and violence and authoritarianism would follow. This was how previous republics
had fallen into civil wars, and the Framers were intent on learning from
history, not repeating its mistakes.
James
Madison, the preeminent theorist of the bunch and rightly called the father of
the Constitution, supported the idea of an “extended republic” (a strong
national government, as opposed to 13 loosely confederated states) for
precisely this reason. In a small republic, he reasoned, factions could more
easily unite into consistent governing majorities. But in a large republic,
with more factions and more distance, a permanent majority with a permanent
minority was less likely.
The Framers thought they were using
the most advanced political theory of the time to prevent parties from forming.
By separating powers across competing institutions, they thought a majority
party would never form. Combine the two insights—a large, diverse republic with
a separation of powers—and the hyper-partisanship that felled earlier republics
would be averted. Or so they believed.
However, political parties formed
almost immediately because modern mass democracy requires them, and
partisanship became a strong identity, jumping across institutions and
eventually collapsing the republic’s diversity into just two camps.
Yet separation of powers and
federalism did work sort of as intended for a long while. Presidents, senators,
and House members all had different electoral incentives, complicating partisan
unity, and state and local parties were stronger than national parties, also
complicating unity.
For much of American political
history, thus, the critique of the two-party system was not that the parties
were too far apart. It was that they were too similar, and that they stood for
too little. The parties operated as loose, big-tent coalitions of state and
local parties, which made it hard to agree on much at a national level.
From the mid-1960s through the
mid-’90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with
liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans
and conservative Democrats. Conservative Mississippi Democrats and liberal New
York Democrats might have disagreed more than they agreed in Congress, but they
could still get elected on local brands. You could have once said the same thing
about liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative Kansas Republicans.
Depending on the issue, different coalitions were possible, which allowed for
the kind of fluid bargaining the constitutional system requires.
But that was before American politics
became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades,
powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two
parties. National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over
government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and
identity. As the conflict sharpened, the parties changed what they stood for.
And as the parties changed, the conflict sharpened further. Liberal Republicans
and conservative Democrats went extinct. The four-party system collapsed into
just two parties.
The Democrats, the party of
diversity and cosmopolitan values, came to dominate in cities but disappeared
from the exurbs. And the Republicans, the party of traditional values and
white, Christian identity, fled the cities and flourished in the exurbs.
Partisan social bubbles began to grow, and congressional districts became more
distinctly one party or the other. As a result, primaries, not general
elections, determine the victor in many districts.
Over the past three decades, both
parties have had roughly equal electoral strength nationally, making control of
Washington constantly up for grabs. Since 1992, the country has cycled through
two swings of the pendulum, from united Democratic government to divided
government to united Republican government and back again, with both sides
seeking that elusive permanent majority, and attempting to sharpen the
distinctions between the parties in order to win it. This also intensified
partisanship.
These triple developments—the
nationalization of politics, the geographical-cultural partisan split, and
consistently close elections—have reinforced one another, pushing both parties
into top-down leadership, enforcing party discipline, and destroying
cross-partisan deal making. Voters now vote the party, not the candidate.
Candidates depend on the party brand. Everything is team loyalty. The stakes
are too high for it to be otherwise.
The consequence is that today,
America has a genuine two-party system with no overlap, the development
the Framers feared most. And it shows no signs of resolving. The two parties
are fully sorted by geography and cultural values, and absent a major
realignment, neither side has a chance of becoming the dominant party in the
near future. But the elusive permanent majority promises so much power, neither
side is willing to give up on it.
This fundamentally breaks the system
of separation of powers and checks and balances that the Framers created. Under
unified government, congressional co-partisans have no incentive to check the
president; their electoral success is tied to his success and popularity. Under
divided government, congressional opposition partisans have no incentive to
work with the president; their electoral success is tied to his failure and unpopularity.
This is not a system of bargaining and compromise, but one of capitulation and
stonewalling.
Congressional stonewalling, in turn,
leads presidents to do more by executive authority, further strengthening the
power of the presidency. A stronger presidency creates higher-stakes
presidential elections, which exacerbates hyper-partisanship, which drives even
more gridlock.
Meanwhile, as hyper-partisanship has
intensified legislative gridlock, more and more important decisions are left to
the judiciary to resolve. This makes the stakes of Supreme Court appointments
even higher (especially with lifetime tenure), leading to nastier confirmation
battles, and thus higher-stakes elections.
See how this all reinforces itself?
That’s what makes it so tricky to resolve, at least in a two-party system with
winner-take-all elections.
Political science has come a long
way since 1787. Had the Framers been able to draw on the accumulated wisdom of
today, they would have accepted that it is impossible to have a modern mass
democracy without political parties, much as they might have wanted it. Parties
make democracy work by structuring politics, limiting policy and voting choices
to a manageable number. They represent and engage diffuse citizens, bringing
them together for a common purpose. Without political parties, politics turns
chaotic and despotic.
The Founders also would have known
that plurality elections (whoever gets the most votes wins) tend to generate
just two parties, while proportional elections (vote shares in multi-winner
districts translate into seat shares) tend to generate multiple parties, with
the district size and threshold percentages shaping the number.
But at the time, the Framers
believed they could have a democracy without parties, and the only electoral
system in operation was the 1430 innovation of plurality voting, which they
imported from Britain without debate. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century
that reformers came up with new voting rules, and until the 20th century that
most advanced democracies moved to proportional representation, supporting
multiparty democracies.
Had the Framers accepted the
inevitability of political parties, and understood the relationship between
electoral rules and the number of parties, I believe they would have attempted
to institutionalize multiparty democracy. Certainly, Madison would have.
“Federalist No. 10,” with its praise of fluid and flexible coalitions, is a
vision of multiparty democracy.
The good news is that nothing in the
Constitution requires a two-party system, and nothing requires the country to
hold simple plurality elections. The elections clause of the Constitution
leaves states to decide their own rules, and reserves to Congress the power to
intervene, a power that Congress has used over the years to enforce the very
plurality-winner single-member districts that keep the two-party system in
place and ensure that most elections are uncompetitive.
If the country wanted to, it could
move to a system of proportional representation for the very next congressional
election. All it would take is an act of Congress. States could also act on
their own.
Multiparty democracy is not perfect.
But it is far superior in supporting the diversity, bargaining, and compromise
that the Framers, and especially Madison, designed America’s institutions
around, and which they saw as essential to the fragile experiment of
self-government.
America has gone through several
waves of political reform throughout its history. Today’s high levels of
discontent and frustration suggest it may be on the verge of another. But the
course of reform is always uncertain, and the key is understanding the problem
that needs to be solved. In this case, the future of American democracy depends
on heeding the warning of the past. The country must break the binary
hyper-partisanship so at odds with its governing institutions, and so dangerous
for self-governance. It must become a multiparty democracy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/two-party-system-broke-constitution/604213/
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