Drutman is partly right: the “two-party doom loop” threatens American democracy and structural reform is needed. But his framework can’t explain how authoritarian movements have seized governing power in countries with multiparty systems such as India, Hungary, and Brazil, and it misses part of the American story. Fusion voting in a multiparty system would provide a big boost in the fight against authoritarianism, but it is not a silver bullet.
Indeed, there are multiple causes of the crisis we face. Our system of government has many deeply undemocratic features baked in by design: the Electoral College, the Senate, and a Supreme Court subject to political capture, to name only a few. Rooted in slavery and elite fear of mass participation in politics, these arrangements block the wills of majorities from being reflected in policy on a wide range of issues, from reproductive rights to gun control to climate change.
This system has not prevented the rise of grotesque economic inequality or the stagnation of living standards for majorities, who increasingly view politics as a spectacle disconnected from their daily lives. Members of both parties have been complicit in this titanic failure of democratic governance over the last fifty years—by supporting tax cuts for the wealthy, the deregulation of corporations, and an evisceration of the social safety net. These conditions, in turn, have fueled the rise of populist, authoritarian movements, which weaken key pillars of democracy, from voting rights to the right to peaceful protest. Their emergence is not only the result of elite manipulation or a failure of political structures (though these factors are certainly accelerants); economic and social conditions are central.
Perhaps the most important cause of our democratic crisis is the collapse of civil society organizations: the churches, unions, and community groups that bring together large numbers of people. Without them, democracy cannot flourish—no matter how much voting mechanisms are reformed.
Neoliberalism has atomized us. Authoritarian movements thrive on the disconnection, apathy, fear, and anxiety that now characterize our individual lives and our culture. The culture of neoliberalism fosters hyperindividualism, blames people who don’t get rich for their failure to do so, and undermines solidarity. In an advisory issued last year, the Surgeon General warned of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” In 2018, only 16 percent of Americans reported feeling “very attached to their local community.” The advisory also cites a decrease in involvement in civic organizations, including “religious groups, clubs, and labor unions.”
The weakening of unions—a core strategy of neoliberal governance—is a particularly important and insufficiently appreciated driver of authoritarianism. As political scientists Jake Grumbach and Ruth Berins Collier have argued in these pages,
unions were critical in sustaining mass democracy by virtue of their role in organizing, mobilizing, and sustaining a politics that embraced a broad pro-democratic coalition, which they were able to do on the basis of materialist demands that went beyond the specific interests of their own membership.
The upshot is clear. Participation in membership organizations is crucial to a healthy democracy, providing important ways for people to build connections, get to know their colleagues or neighbors, and feel part of something bigger than themselves. If democracy doesn’t exist in your neighborhood or workplace—and if the habits of democracy aren’t practiced in your union or local community organizations—it’s unlikely to be persuasive for you as a system of organizing society. It’s no wonder that a record-low percentage of Americans feel “satisfied with the way democracy is working.”
Though Drutman acknowledges the role of civil society organizations, he passes over them too quickly, downplaying their significance in light of the “mega-identities” that he says parties help to construct. But can we build those “mega-identities” in the absence of organizations that cultivate people’s identities as workers or ground their attachments to place or shared faith? The evidence from successful anti-authoritarian movements around the world suggests not. The Workers Party in Brazil, for example, is nourished by its roots in unions and organizations of landless workers, women, Afro-Brazilians, and LGBTQ+ people.
Such organizations have played an essential role in nourishing democracy in the United States too. The great expansions of democracy in U.S. history, from the abolition of slavery to the expansion of the right to vote for women and African Americans, were brought about by vibrant social movements, rooted in organizations like the Black church, suffragette groups, and labor unions. At times, multiparty structures have helped achieve reforms, as Drutman suggests. But the engine of change has always been mass participation in social movements, which provide the momentum to overcome daunting barriers in the structures of politics—as when the civil rights movement forced change through a Senate held captive by leaders from states of the former Confederacy.
While an authoritarian threat now looms and civil society has been diminished, the upsurge of worker organizing in recent years offers a source of enormous hope. In the past year alone, Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga voted to join the United Auto Workers, becoming the first in the South to do so at a company outside of the Big Three (Ford, GM, and Chrysler). Meanwhile, fast food workers in California have established the first-ever union for the industry, and public support for unions continues to grow. According to a recent Pew poll, 54 percent of U.S. adults believe the decline in union membership has been “bad for the country,” and 59 percent say it has been “bad for working people.”
Along with unions, a new generation of community and faith-based organizations are working in rural areas and with constituencies too often neglected by progressives. Tackling issues from the opioid crisis to child and family well-being, organizations like Hoosier Action in Indiana and ISAIAH in Minnesota are restoring people’s sense of agency, bringing people across lines that often divide us, and creating a sense of belonging in this era of radical isolation.
In stark contrast to the bottom-up mass movements that have driven most advances in American democracy, the field of democracy advocates in the United States has been disproportionately white and middle-class, focused on top-down, technocratic reforms to political systems—many of which are promising, but lack a mass base connected to working-class people. The reality is that a strong democracy requires not just a healthy electoral system, but also a rich ecosystem of civil society organizations that bring people from different backgrounds together and invite them to imagine a better future.
Electoral reforms, including fusion voting, can certainly help drive democratic revival. In fact, one of the strongest cases for fusion voting is one that Drutman doesn’t make: it can work synergistically with community and labor organizing, by incentivizing community organizations to build political organizations that more directly bring their members’ voices into the democratic arena. Likewise, broader structural reform must surely be part of how we unrig a system that fails working-class people. But there can be no shortcuts to building the mass organizations and movements that will power a democratic resurgence.
