ANNIHILATE the Two-Party System
Here's how...
The United States loves markets. One of the key factors that supposedly separated us from the communists during the Cold War was our freedom of choice. There is an overwhelming glut of options everywhere you look in the American marketplace. A trip to the grocery store can be an all-out assault on the senses. Need some cleaning spray? Here are 20 different alternatives. Would you like to buy some ice cream? Here is an entire aisle with literally hundreds of options. Thirsty for some soda? Here is another aisle with a couple of hundred variations. There’s ginger ale, at least three kinds either diet or full sugar. Six or more different root beers and sarsaparillas are on offer. Coke or Pepsi – there’s diet, zero sugar, caffeine free, diet caffeine free, cherry, cherry vanilla, diet cherry, original flavor, cane sugar variety, and on and on. We aren’t even halfway down the aisle yet!
Yet when it comes to politics there are only ever two choices: Democrats or Republicans. It doesn’t matter what your tastes are. It doesn’t matter what you think is important. You have two options to choose from and that’s it. Can you think of any other place in American life where there are only two options? Perhaps saltwater or freshwater swimming? Even then you could go brackish. More baffling still is the fact that Americans seem to accept the complete lack of alternatives without much complaint.
The dearth of options has a poisonous effect on our polity. True, the major parties fight like cats over the things they disagree about. But for the areas where they hold common ground, we never hear a peep. No disagreement means no debate. We have already explored at some length how the major parties are willing to countenance the erosion of this country’s democracy as they conspire for their own side’s advantage. Both major parties seem pretty cool with the mission creep of the surveillance state steadily eating away at our privacy. Both parties are unperturbed by the endless War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex creating the world’s largest penal system inside these free United States, while at the same time allowing crooked bank executives to go unpunished. Neither party is willing to discuss the breathtaking power that business holds in this country or even consider the possibility of finding a different balance. We’d all be much better off if we had a wider range of voices than the Republicans and what Kevin Phillips called “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.”
Just as winner-take-all protects the political class from accountability it also robs voters of choice. I hope you can now see the reason there are no third parties and so few independent candidates in the United States is a function of how we run our elections. It’s not because Americans are uniquely opposed to minority parties. It’s not because these parties have no good ideas. It’s because our election system is winner-take-all and that’s it.
Sadly this is just a problem we all must live with because this is the way that all democratic representatives on earth get elected and the system will never be improved upon.
Oh wait, that’s not true at all!
The fact is that winner-take-all is old tech, an inherited 18th-century political arrangement that other former British colonies like Australia and New Zealand have long since abandoned. Even the UK itself quit using winner-take-all for everything but elections for the House of Commons - and may soon end that as well. All of continental Europe has moved on to using newer, mid-19th-century election innovations. (We’re only 150 years or so behind the times.) The point here is that it is possible to elect representatives without leaving vast swaths of the public as political orphans.
It’s called proportional representation. Like, everybody’s doing it, bruh.
Here's the basic idea: whereas now you have single-seat districts divided roughly equally amongst a state's population, with a proportional system you have multi-seat districts where winners are chosen according to their popularity. Say there is a state with a 10-member delegation in the US House. If one party won 60 percent of that state’s vote they would get six of the seats. If another party won 20 percent they two would get two seats. And so on.
Even with a change to, say, three-seat districts there could be dramatic changes in the House. Steven Hill uses the example of a three-seat district in the deep south. Using a 25 percent victory threshold you might expect to see a progressive African American Democrat, a conservative white Republican, and one moderate Democrat or Republican. Top line, one of the first things proportional representation does is create legislatures that look more like the people they represent. If a significant portion of a given city’s population is poor or Latino, not to mention female, then under proportional representation one would expect their representatives to start looking less rich, white, and male.
Proportional representation eliminates the orphan voter phenomenon. It is unjust that citybound Republicans should go unrepresented because of where they live. So too, it is wrong that progressives who live in America's wide-open rural areas should never have a voice. Every citizen deserves representation. With proportional representation, if an area is evenly divided, 51 percent of the voters don’t get all the spoils of victory while 49 percent get nothing. With proportional representation, 51 percent of voters get half the delegation. It's much fairer. In this way, everybody wins.
With proportional representation all of the downsides of gerrymandering – and winner-take-all – basically evaporate at once. The zero-sum nature of our current political system would disappear. In a proportional system the candidate is no longer trying to win the majority of the vote, just a significant chunk. In a three-seat race a candidate only needs to be one of the top three winners to get a seat. In a ten-seat race a candidate has to be but one of the top ten winners. When that happens, campaigns would no longer be "I win, you lose." This means that there is less benefit in going negative. If anything, going negative can hurt you because turning people off would influence a candidate's support. Playing to the base is not the point. In proportional systems, it matters if the other side hates you. It is up to a candidate to appeal to enough people who share their views to win a chance to represent them.
With less reason to play to the base in a specially carved out single-seat district, there is less advantage for “pointlessly adversarial” politics. It would be possible for the two major parties to become less polarized if the general election became more competitive than the primary election. The typical base voters of both parties would still have candidates who espoused more extreme views, but less partisan candidates would be rewarded by those formerly orphaned voters who had little reason to participate in the winner-take-all system. With a less polarized system, there would be less gridlock and less reason to wait until the next election to possibly win enough power to advance one side’s agenda. That means more balanced legislating and less deathmatch-your-side-my-side partisan sniping.
Most important of all would be the dismantling of the two-party system itself. If it were possible for a candidate to win a seat in the US House with 10 to 33 percent of the vote not only would the lesser-of-two-evils conundrum disappear – so would two-party dominance. If voting for the candidate you like no longer runs the risk of handing victory to the candidate you dislike most, Duverger’s Law is neutralized. With proportional representation, there would no longer be any such thing as a wasted vote. No spoilers. No more uncontested elections. No safe seats. With the healing of these unsightly oozing blisters on the American body politic, fresh new political parties would finally have the opportunity to take root and bloom. And with these new parties would come fresh new choices and ideas that have never existed in the tired old Pepsi versus Coke dynamic we have now.
Maybe it made sense more than 200 years ago to base political representation on the small geographic area where you lived. But there are too many downsides to the existing winner-take-all system. Everyone should be represented in government, not just the bare majority of those who live in a geographic region dictated by the ruling party of an even bigger yet still arbitrary geographic division. There are much better options with proven track records available to us. Proportional representation is the obvious choice. As Steven Hill puts it, you can have geographic representation based on where you live or you can have proportional representation based on what you think. I know which I would prefer.
Neither major party will ever advocate this. To do so would be to ensure their own annihilation. Personally, I think that's a really great reason TO advocate for proportional representation. Here's something else: Even if you don't agree with me about economics or taxing the rich, you should agree with me about this. All votes should count. Conservatives living in cities, lend me your ears. Progressives living in rural areas across the country - how about it? Who wants their vote to count? Is there anything more democratic than that? Normal people stand to benefit from a change like this. It's another great reason to think outside the tired, exhausted old two-party dynamic. We don't have to keep things this way. It's possible to make life better for the majority in this country. I hope you'll think about what I've said. In the meantime, please give a like, follow, favorite, and consider subscribing to my free substack. Let's MAKE them pay.
How come no one ever comments??? Hey Scott! Nice post! or Wow Scott, rare misfire. or I agree! or I disagree! Anyhoo, I welcome your comments dear reader.
Great post. My first concern is the chokehold mainstream media holds over the parties.
Second, the two party system has its flaws, but parliamentary coalitions are even more fractious and fragile. Is it possible we have become too big to govern effectively?
I recently read that the House was capped at 435 in 1929. If we were to look at the census from 1910 to 2020, the number of people each representative represents has grown nearly 400%. (My math might be inaccurate, but it roughly went from around 200,000 to over 750,000 people per rep.) Could you imagine a HoR with the number of reps required to follow that 1929 Reapportionment Law? Now add gerrymandering and redrawing district lines Willy-nilly. It’s a cluster-*%#.
Lastly, as described in your post about Trump and Fascism, the rhetorical temperature is way above boiling. The idea of compromise, bipartisan legislation, and recognizing the validity of elections as sacred, died in 2000. We are living in very turbulent times, and for many evangelicals they welcome the chaos as the beginning of the “end times”. As was the case in Nazi Germany, it is NOT a good time to be an intellectual. All I can do is, love my family, provide in the best way I can, and stay informed.