Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    We Need More Parties
    We Need More Parties
    We Need More Parties
    Ebook168 pages2 hours

    We Need More Parties

    By Lee Drutman

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    American democracy is broken, but partisanship alone is not to blame. Political scientist Lee Drutman places our two-party system instead at the center of the American democratic crisis. Of course, partisan conflict plays a role, forcing voters to choose between a party that they might dislike and another that is far worse. But the two party system creates this corrosive dynamic. And the results of this system are dire: more partisan division, low political legitimacy, and high citizen disaffection.

    This is how democracies crumble. The way to save democracy, Drutman argues, is to create more and better political parties through electoral reform and fusion voting.

    We Need More Parties features responses to Drutman from Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell, political scientists Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, political theorist and former candidate for Massachusetts governor Danielle Allen, and others.

    The issue also includes essays on American democracy and the question of political legitimacy: Project 2025 and abuses of executive power, the anointing of J. D. Vance and the liberal embrace of "reasonable conservatives”, the politics of grief in rural America, and more.

    Contributors: Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Danielle Allen, Deepak Bhargava, Elizabeth Catte, Kevin Donovan, Lee Drutman, James Goodwin, Arianna Jiménez, Josh Lerner, Cerin Lindgrensavage, Bob Master, Maurice Mitchell, Joel Rogers, Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman, Doran Schrantz, Ian Shapiro, Honora Spicer, Sunaura Taylor, Grant Tudor, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, and David Walsh


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBoston Review
    Release dateOct 1, 2024
    ISBN9781946511904
    We Need More Parties

    Related to We Need More Parties

    Related ebooks

    Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Let a Thousand Parties Bloom

      Oct 24, 2019

      Let a Thousand Parties Bloom
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Q & A

      Jun 28, 2024

      Q _ When did the two of you meet and how did your collaboration come about? A _ We connected over Instagram DM on January 9, 2021, to talk about the insurrection. The rest is history. What about political participation excites you? Why do you feel i

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Stand For Something

      Oct 12, 2018

      THE OTHER DAY I had a long chat with a veteran editor I admire about what he said was Mother Jones’ “bias.” Just admit it, he said. You’re partisan. Otherwise, why would you have so many articles about corruption and malfeasance by Donald Trump and R

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How to Save Democracy

      Oct 21, 2022

      How to Save Democracy
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘Completely Uncharted Territory’: The Threat To US Democracy In 2024

      Jul 12, 2021

      A Harvard scholar talks about how the U.S. differs from Chile and Hungary – and how serious a threat U.S. democracy faces in the next election cycle.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Oldest Question in Politics

      Jan 17, 2022

      ALMOST 25 YEARS AGO, I BEGAN TO NOTICE A DISTURBING TREND in fledgling democracies. Countries in the former Soviet empire and elsewhere were holding elections, leaders were gaining power with considerable popular support—but these leaders were then a

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Scare Talk On Steroids

      Jun 24, 2021

      Scare Talk On Steroids
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      John Harris

      Nov 15, 2024

      John Harris
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for We Need More Parties

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      We Need More Parties - Lee Drutman

      Publisher & Coeditor-in-Chief Deborah Chasman

      Coeditor-in-Chief Joshua Cohen

      Executive Editor Matt Lord

      Assistant Editor Cameron Avery

      Associate Publisher Jasmine Parmley

      Circulation Manager Irina Costache

      Contributing Editors Adom Getachew, Lily Hu, Walter Johnson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Paul Pierson, Becca Rothfeld, & Simon Torracinta

      Production Assistant Ione Barrows

      Editorial Fellow Finley Williams

      Finance Manager Anthony DeMusis III

      Board of Advisors Derek Schrier (Chair), Margo Beth Fleming, Archon Fung, Deborah Fung, Larry Kramer, Richard M. Locke, Jeff Mayersohn, Scott Nielsen, Robert Pollin, Hiram Samel, Kim Malone Scott, Brandon M. Terry, & Michael Voss

      Interior Graphic Design Zak Jensen & Alex Camlin

      Cover Design Alex Camlin

      We Need More Parties is Boston Review issue 2024.3 (Forum 31 / 49.3 under former designation system).

      Image on page 7: Getty Images

      Printed and bound in the United States by Sheridan.

      Distributed by Haymarket Books (www.haymarketbooks.org) to the trade in the U.S. through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

      To become a member, visit bostonreview.net/memberships.

      For questions about donations and major gifts, contact Irina Costache, [email protected].

      For questions about memberships, email [email protected].

      Boston Review

      PO Box 390568

      Cambridge, MA 02139

      ISSN: 0734-2306 / ISBN: 978-1-946511-89-8

      Authors retain copyright of their work.

      © 2024, Boston Critic, Inc.

      CONTENTS

      Editors’ Note

      FORUM

      We Need More Parties

      Lee Drutman

      With responses from Danielle Allen, Deepak Bhargava & Arianna Jiménez, Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, Josh Lerner, Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Grant Tudor & Cerin Lindgrensavage, Joel Rogers, Ian Shapiro, Bob Master, and Maurice Mitchell & Doran Schrantz. Drutman replies.

      Post Colonialism | DISPATCH

      Honora Spicer

      The Dream of a Responsible Conservative | ESSAY

      David Austin Walsh

      Mapping Injury | INTERVIEW

      Sunaura Taylor interviewed by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

      The Politics of Price | REVIEW

      Kevin P. Donovan

      Inside Project 2025 | ESSAY

      James Goodwin

      Grieving in Rural America | REVIEW

      Elizabeth Catte

      CONTRIBUTORS

      EDITORS’ NOTE

      AMERICAN POLITICS is more polarized than ever. In November we face another high-stakes election, pitting a fragile Democratic coalition against Donald Trump, who has said he will only be a dictator for the first day of his second term. How can we achieve a healthier democracy?

      In our forum, Lee Drutman argues that we need to expand our two-party system. With just two major parties to choose from, lots of voters are pressured to stick with a team they do not like because the other side is far worse. Others are simply left out—casting their precious votes for third parties that can’t win or withdrawing from politics altogether.

      Drutman’s solution is to revive fusion voting, an electoral system that allows different parties to nominate the same candidate for public office and run the candidate on their own ballot line. It was once the norm in U.S. politics, fostering a vibrant, multiparty political culture. But it started to be banned in the early twentieth century and remains legal today only in a handful of states. Bringing it back, Drutman urges, would empower new parties and give far more people a voice. This is a long-term project, but we can—we must—start now.

      Can fusion be restored? Is it the best path to a more robust democracy? A range of reformers, organizers, and scholars weigh in, including former candidate for Massachusetts governor Danielle Allen, Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell, and New Party founder Joel Rogers. Most agree that democracy depends on strong parties. Some question how much fusion voting would help. Others propose different reforms or look to social movements as the primary drivers of change.

      Also in this issue, contributors ask how public narratives advance or foreclose democratic possibilities. Honora Spicer reports from the U.S.-Mexico border, where a U.S. postal route was recently designated a national historic trail, eliding stories of exclusion hiding in plain sight. Kevin Donovan looks behind seemingly neutral accounting conventions, showing how they insulate political consequences from public debate.

      And in a review of three new books, historian Elizabeth Catte dismantles political myths about poor and rural white people, clarifying who is responsible for their suffering and abandonment. She sees a way forward in Reverend William Barber’s call for moral fusion—a movement built on bottom-up organization and solidarity among all those grieving in our broken democracy.

      ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. has no chance of becoming president, but he was not wrong when he said last fall that Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor. Fewer than one in four Americans think the country is heading in the right direction. More than two in three think the political and economic system needs major changes. Eight in ten are worried about the future of American democracy in the 2024 election. More than one in four view both parties unfavorably.

      The stakes of this election are extremely high, but the pathologies of American politics will endure no matter the outcome. Antisystem alienation and hyperpartisanship are reinforcing each other in deeply destabilizing ways that can’t be repaired simply by selecting better candidates.

      We face a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution—and that solution, I contend, is to break out of our broken two-party system.

      I make my case in two parts. The first explores how the U.S. party system lies at the root of our political dysfunction. The party system is the whole ballgame—it determines how citizens understand and engage in politics, the nature and tone of conflict, and the health and stability of democracy. When that system doesn’t work properly, the politics that emerge from it will be broken, too—and other kinds of democratic reform will have only temporary impacts at best.

      The way forward, I argue in the second part, is to introduce more parties and break the two-party doom loop, specifically by reviving fusion voting: an electoral system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for a public office. I say revive because fusion voting was once common in U.S. politics, before it was banned in the early twentieth century by the dominant parties. Though the state-by-state specifics varied, the broad motivation was simple: they didn’t like all the added competition fusion enabled.

      Today fusion voting remains legal only in two states, New York and Connecticut. Reviving it across the country would allow third parties to be legitimate players on the electoral scene—not just spoilers or bystanders. It would empower Americans who have long felt disillusioned with the two major parties—or disconnected from politics altogether—to have a real say. And it would pave the way to an important longer-term reform: proportional representation.

      At this moment of hyperpartisanship, it may seem paradoxical to conclude that more parties are the solution. But modern representative democracy is party democracy; we need to make it work, not try to circumvent it. Reinvigorating the party system, with more and better parties, is the best place to start.

      Part 1: It’s the Party System, Stupid

      THE RIGHT PRESCRIPTION to our ailing democracy depends on the right diagnosis, so it is important to get the story right about how we got to this moment.

      The most common view is a classic decline-and-fall narrative. On this account, there was once a time when American democracy worked, before partisan polarization messed it all up. Moderates dominated; partisans disagreed, but they worked out differences in a spirit of constructive bipartisanship and remained close to the political center. This golden age allegedly peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, and maybe even continued through the 1980s—but then things all went downhill starting in the 1990s with new confrontational politics pioneered by Newt Gingrich, the archetypical villain of this story. The tone in politics turned nasty and dysfunctional; cable news and talk radio, and then social media, destroyed everything. Most of the good, reasonable, compromise-minded politicians either left politics or got primaried by extremists.

      This explanation is a good first approximation of what has gone wrong, and I have told versions of it in the past. But it oversimplifies in significant ways—and because it oversimplifies, it invites the wrong solution. If we want to fix things, this story suggests, we have to re-empower the exhausted majority in the middle—the mass of voters who just want stuff to get done, unlike the ideologues and extremists of left and right. In other words, we need to force parties to be more responsive to the median voter.

      Behind this metaphor of the middle lie several assumptions. One is that voters have consistent ideological preferences—formed independently of political parties—that can be specified on a single axis running from the extreme left to the extreme right. Another is that voters decide who to vote for by accurately selecting the party closest to them on this ideological spectrum—and that parties, too, can be classified in this one-dimensional way. Still another is that there really is a sizable group of voters in the political center.

      When we talk in these terms, we are applying what political scientists call the median voter theory to American elections. And it’s little surprise that we do so. As Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, this model has been the master theory of U.S. politics for half a century, at least among political scientists. Partly (but not only) for that reason, it is the analytical water in which much political analysis now swims.

      The theory first came to prominence in Anthony Downs’s 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy. Having just finished a PhD in economics at Stanford, Downs deployed the tools of rational choice theory to explain why two-party politics might converge in the middle. It was not a crazy idea for the time. In the years following World War II, the two major parties had largely converged across a wide range of policy areas. Simultaneously, the academic study of politics was undergoing a sea change as a new generation of scholars embraced economic modeling for its apparent rigor. Unlike the thick methodologies of the field’s past—which drew heavily on sociological and institutional theory—the new, thin models, it was argued, could be tested with data.

      Both inside the academy and out, the median voter theory came to stand for an ideal as well as a natural state of politics. It provided a baseline against which commentators could analyze politics, campaign strategists could promote winning strategies, and political scientists could test hypotheses. A simplistic version flourished in the public sphere, offering a narrative that was both easy to understand and delightfully boosterish about the American two-party system. Array everyone on a single-axis line, assume most people are close to the middle, and voilà! You get an American success story: a stable two-party democracy of moderation and broad consensus.

      In reality, Downs’s argument hadn’t been quite so simple. A two-party system cannot provide stable and effective government, he wrote, unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens. This caveat proved prophetic. In September 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine Black teenagers who wished to attend Central High, which until then had been an all-white school. An angry white mob, backed by Governor Orval Faubus, showed up to prevent the teens from doing so. The background consensus that postwar U.S. politics had banked on suddenly seemed to dissolve—not least because it had depended on excluding a larger number of Americans from politics entirely, including African Americans in the Jim Crow South.

      What median voter theorists had interpreted as two-party convergence along a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1