I hope Drutman’s smart essay is widely read and moves readers to action. In some places I dissent from his argument, and in other places I see room for improvement. Before getting to either, however, let me state my agreement with most of what Drutman has to say.
I agree that American democracy is in crisis and that changing our current party system is key to restoring its health. Having only two tribal and fully nationalized parties—each effectively uniform across branches and chambers and between national, state, and local government—is a truly terrible way to run a country as diverse and evenly divided on national identity as the United States. It promotes a win-or-die polarization that breeds instability while negating responsible government and ruining our civic health. The fact that this system is overwhelmingly funded by the rich—and shaped by a media ecosystem that is guided more by a quest for conflict and clickbait than truth—only makes it more repellant to American patriots.
I also agree that political parties are indispensable to mass democracy. Among what political scientists call civil society’s “secondary associations” (as opposed to the “primary” ones of family, religion, or nation)—a vast field including professional associations, business groups, lobbying organizations, unions, advocacy organizations, cooperatives, charitable organizations, and the like—parties are the most important to democracy. That is because they are the only ones that directly involve individual citizens in what defines democracy itself: self-rule with equal respect among the rulers. Parties also prepare citizens for such rule. They develop citizens’ civic muscles and habits of democratic association by inviting and enabling them to engage in all sorts of political action. And the policy platforms candidates run on give time-short and information-scarce citizens cognitive relief and political identity—a way to make sense of the world and see their values and interests potentially expressed in policy. Political parties do this for many people at once, enabling the reduction in choices needed for millions of votes to be signals rather than mere noise.
I also agree that serious reform of this party system should take parties themselves as its focus, including their enabling conditions and the rules governing their interaction. This sensible suggestion breaks with the bounds of current electoral reform discussion, which instead focuses nearly exclusively on candidates: improving the terms on which campaigns are funded (e.g., New York City’s or Seattle’s public subsidies), where they are chosen (“jungle” primaries, “final four”), or how voter preferences are aggregated (“ranked choice voting” or “Condorcet”). There are things that might be said on behalf of each of these reforms, though some are deeply antidemocratic. But common to all of them is a focus on individuals, not the parties and rules that define our system. If our broken system is a room, these proposals amount to changing its drapes rather than its furniture.
And, finally, I am all for Drutman’s central recommendations on how to make more meaningful changes: proportional representation (PR) and, more immediately, the recovery of the plural-nomination or “fusion” option in U.S. party politics. PR would repeal the basic rule—found nowhere in our Constitution but legislated by the two major parties, which it benefits—that elections in the United States are decided by a plurality (sometimes a majority) of votes in single-member election districts, where the winner takes all (i.e., is the only representative of that district). Implementing PR would entail multimember districts, with seats competed for by more parties. Applied nationally, this system would almost certainly require an increase in the number of elected representatives in our many legislative bodies, including Congress.
But while possibilities for municipal PR abound, its near-term national prospects are roughly zero. Fusion would be a more modest change. It is the distinctive American way of giving real weight to minority electoral sentiment, allowing voters to vote their values without wasting their votes. Like PR, it would generate more parties. But unlike PR, it has a very long history of productive use in the United States and encourages bigger winning pluralities. All these things, I think, give fusion a better chance of success here than PR.
But so much for where I agree. My chief disagreement is with Drutman’s claim that our party system is the root cause of our present democratic crisis. I disagree because democratic government is today challenged all over the globe—including in many multiparty systems, with proportional representation of the sort Drutman favors. As an ideal of order, democracy has no rivals in global public opinion, but citizen confidence in it as a form of government has reached record lows, while dissatisfaction with their own governments record highs. We need a less U.S.-centric view of democracy’s current troubles.
My own view includes these elements, common to virtually all the world’s democracies.
First, there is the detritus of our half-century, transnational, elite-led experiment with neoliberalism. Governments around the world have retreated from protecting their citizens from corporate predation and given more authority to less regulated markets. The result has done tremendous damage to all sorts of enablers of collective action and people’s confidence in government.
Second, there has been an independent crisis of state competence and legitimacy. Ever-growing interdependence and complexity (and growing recognition of both) has increased demand for a variety of essential new public goods (non-excludable and non-rival), including the ability to provide customized—and certainly non-actuarial—social supports. The former excites free-riders and those resenting contribution; the latter are nearly exactly the thing most public bureaucracies are not set up to do, and broadly incapable of doing within prevailing ideas of rule of law.
Third, we have seen the erosion of the public sphere and mutual trust. Occasioned in part by the two phenomena just noted, this trend has been further fueled by the tech-enabled fragmentation of media audiences, the collapse of local print media, the rise of massively divisive social media, and the simultaneous decline of all sorts of collective organizations: unions, churches, encompassing community organizations, sports clubs, and so on. The “public” is now a largely fugitive character.
The result is that people are more isolated from and fearful of others and understandably less confident of or inclined to positive collective action, which is what democracy is about. In this world, democracy’s doldrums are not puzzling.
Of course, in recent years, neoliberalism’s choking grip has loosened. New knowledge and tech offer humanity a pretty clear choice. They can be used to address Keynes’s “permanent problem” of living “wisely and agreeably and well” with each other and nature from a more pacific urbanized world of egalitarian democratic abundance. Alternatively, we can allow them to be used to produce unprecedented inequality, more efficient domination, unending war, and biosphere destruction. It would be nice to organize more political communities competing for public power with alternative suggestions for its use—that is, more political parties—to guide us in that choice. But that’s what our present party system makes nearly impossible.
I conclude with three bits of advice to those who want to improve that system by recovering the fusion option within it. First, we need ballot-line (or “disaggregated”) fusion. It’s not enough to cluster multiple fusing parties on one ballot line; their lines must first be separated, before votes cast on them are combined. Second, the benefits of this approach can be easily defeated by excessive requirements on qualifying for and then maintaining ballot status, so both of these processes must be watched. And third, fusion has no friends with power. Beneficiaries of the two-party duopoly will resist, as will federal courts still bound by the pathetically regressive 1997 opinion in Timmons, where the Supreme Court affirmed its reverential loyalty both to the two-party system and present occupants of that duopoly. That basically leaves only state courts and especially referenda—available in twenty-six states and hundreds of cities.
But that’s certainly enough to get started, so let’s get to it!
