Drutman is a rarity in American politics: a process-oriented reformer who is also a cheerleader for political parties. Ever since the Gilded Age, reformers aiming to fiddle with rules, clean up politics, and make it less nasty have tended to be anti-party. In their eyes, parties and party politicians divide society and foment needless anger.
Drutman deserves great credit for rejecting this outlook. Nevertheless, his vision of pro-party reform retains a distinctly limited character. We take our cue from a very different tradition of pro-party reform that emphasizes how parties serve as vehicles for social visions. Most notably, midcentury liberals sought a Democratic Party that would fulfill the New Deal’s promise. Procedural reform, in this tradition, is inseparable from its substantive ends.
In that spirit, we worry that Drutman overpromises and underdelivers. We find both his diagnosis (“hyperpartisanship”) and his proposed cure (fusion voting) hindered by a view of parties as creators of identities rather than as claimants for power. And we find his analysis obtuse to the partisan and institutional sources of our present predicament. Today’s threats to American democracy emerge largely from the right, and they interact with the deep flaws in a Madisonian system that frustrates majorities—but Drutman is too shy about the former fact and too neglectful of the latter. We see value in throwing anti-Trump Republicans the lifeline of a ballot line, one that also teaches centrists worried about democracy to appreciate the merits of party. But we must be clear-eyed about its limits as a solution.
Consider the institutional perils first. Yale political scientist Juan Linz warned in 1990 of “the perils of presidentialism,” with its zero-sum conflict and its temptations toward demagogy. At the time, Linz wasn’t concerned about the seemingly stable United States. Yet this country now exhibits virtually all the pathologies he described, with high-pitched presidential elections refracted through the rickety Electoral College. The wildly unrepresentative Senate stands out among the world’s legislatures as a sorry outlier. Frequent periods of divided government, to say nothing of the Senate’s extraconstitutional supermajority rules for cloture, make for gridlock and stalemate. And a Supreme Court with extremely strong judicial review and life tenure for its members has anointed itself as the system’s ultimate decider.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become decidedly dangerous. The trouble runs far deeper than mere polarization: all-consuming resentment politics, careening short-termism, institutional ruthlessness, and shameless embrace of ethnonationalism. These tendencies trace back decades in American conservatism; the separation between mainstream and extreme right imagined by many now-disillusioned conservatives is largely a myth. By 2016, it took only Donald Trump’s match to ignite the dumpster fire. One can find examples of destructive and even antisystem behavior on the other side aplenty, but as a party, the problem is the Republicans, and any diagnosis ought to proceed accordingly.
These institutional and partisan ills have become inseparable. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have noted, the GOP has turned away from even the attempt to win big popular majorities as rural biases in the political system give the party a leg up. Its efforts to exploit the rules of the game now extend not just to districting and voter eligibility but the counting of votes. And, as the events of January 6, 2021, made all too vivid, Republicans increasingly disavow the willingness to lose and fight again that stands at the very core of democracy. Tackling these linked crises means thinking about party projects to win majorities and wield state power in ways that will vanquish the appeal of Trumpism. And it means institutional reform that will attack the system’s weak points head on. If either or both of those goals are deemed wrong or impossible, fair enough. But these substantive stakes ought to inform democracy promoters’ conversations about solutions.
From this perspective, fusion’s weaknesses come to the fore. Most immediately, fusion does nothing about presidentialism, never mind the Senate and the Supreme Court. No matter how votes accrue, only one person will serve as president. Fusion thus offers no way out from the high-stakes drama of presidential elections or the president’s temptations to arrogate power in office. As scholars of Latin American politics have stressed time and again, multipartyism and presidentialism are a bad mix, making coalitions hard to build and opposition hard to coalesce.
What fusion does offer, appealingly, is a way for pro- democracy forces unhappy with waving the Democratic banner to join a multiparty coalition during our (lowercase) democratic emergency. From the left, the plucky Working Families Party (WFP) in New York has long extolled the mechanism. In turn, Drutman has helped to raise fusion’s profile among centrist reformers. But beyond these two pockets, it is hard to see where the energy for fusion will come from or why fusion hits the “sweet spot”—at once achievable and transformative—that Drutman claims for it. Perhaps mainstream Democrats and some substantial number of Republicans will see the logic and join the charge, but Drutman does not explain just how this might happen.
Fusion’s history illuminates its limits. It was a component but hardly the linchpin of a complex, now-vanished nineteenth-century political system. Party politics, in the antebellum period especially, was fluid, with loyalties shifting and new parties forming and breaking apart. Parties were often meant as temporary expedients rather than permanent institutions, and separate state organizations came together only in the quadrennial national convention. Those parties would often cross-endorse, but such endorsements were contingent responses to particular situations, not an inevitability of the process. Contrary to Drutman’s claims, the sectarian Liberty Party refused to support even Joshua Giddings, the most radical antislavery Whig in the House. Nor did the collapse of the Whig Party emerge in any direct way from “abolitionists’ fusion-voting efforts.” Fusion could not then and cannot now reorient the fundamental patterns of division in national politics.
Fusion’s more recent fate in New York also offers only tempered grounds for optimism. WFP has often been a valuable player, but its preeminent concern with its own ballot line, for which it must receive 130,000 votes for president or governor, has weakened its substantive contribution. The ballot line itself, more than any policy, was the central element in the long, convoluted drama between WFP and its archnemesis, Andrew Cuomo. And before it, the Liberal Party, initially a vehicle for labor unions’ anticommunist reform politics, devolved into a patronage mill that wags deemed neither liberal nor a party. Fusion has hardly fostered an ideal political culture surrounding it. New York has restrictive rules around voting and elections, and the dominant New York Democratic Party is notably dysfunctional.
An unacknowledged tension runs through Drutman’s argument. On the one hand, he appreciates parties for their staying power as “the clans of electoral politics,” offering “belonging and purpose.” On the other hand, he suggests parties can arise quickly, at just the right moment, when circumstances—like ours now—require. This view softens the institutional demands of party and the special meaning of party loyalty. As Drutman rightly says, there is more to parties than “endorsements from already existing civil society organizations.” Define party downward and it risks becoming just an NGO with a ballot line.
At a time when the two parties are stretched to the breaking point, some kind of relief valve looks mighty appealing. But being pro-party means more than multiplying ballot lines. It means building a polity with the organized power of robust parties at the very core.
