You'll notice one of the links I've posted is to Washington's Farewell Address, which to my mind is one of the wisest political documents in American history. Among other things--such as his famous declaration of religion and morality as the "indispensable supports" of popular government and his exhortation to cultivate "peace and harmony" with all nations--our retiring first president warned his fellow countrymen about the "baneful effects" of party spirit, which "serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."
It is easy enough to see how prophetic Washington's words were, both in his time and in our own. And yet Washington was no naive fool; he himself admitted that party spirit has "its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed" and "within certain limits" political parties do provide "useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty."
My own opinion about political parties--formed reluctantly after years of cynicism and reflection--is that they are a necessarily evil, that for reasons of basic human frailty democratic nations cannot conceivably conduct their public affairs without them. But, knowing that we are doomed to live with them, I believe our country would be much better served by the healthy competition of multiple parties than it is by the stagnant monopoly (or is it duopoly?) of our two-party system. The predictable response to this idea is that "we would just end up like Italy" with a crazy circus of third parties constantly winning and losing power. I disagree. I think Italy's parliament reflects the boisterous nature of a Mediterranean society descended from feuding city-states, while in Northern Europe and particularly in England, from whom we derived our political system, one seldom sees more than a few parties in office at any given time. But even three parties are often a vast improvement over two, as one of the two dominant parties must inevitably seek to build a coalition with the third, usually by making concessions to one of the third party's key issues. If Greens and Libertarians were elected to the U.S. Congress, one could easily imagine occasional partnerships between the Democrats and the Greens on one hand, and the Republicans and the Libertarians on the other, with the result that at least some Green and Libertarian ideas would get passed into law. If nothing else the Republicans might start paying more than mere lip service to the idea of "minimal government" if the Libertarian Party had a visible presence in Congress. As it stands now, voters who favor 1) smaller government, 2) balanced budgets and 3) a better form of taxation (be it a flat income tax or a consumption tax of some kind) have no choice at all other than two parties that will never deliver all three, or even just two of the three. And that's a real pity.
To compound this problem, Democrats and Republicans in all 50 states have erected many insurmountable legal and financial barriers that keep third party candidates from ever having a reasonable chance of being elected. Martin Gross catalogues some of these barriers in The Political Racket.
One might fairly ask me at this point, "Wouldn't electing more parties to office just make party spirit worse by simply multiplying it?" It might, but in fact it usually seems to have the opposite effect. The reason, again, is that the parties have to play nicer when building coalitions. It is the smug arrogance of uncontested power that seems to fuel party spirit more than anything, as we see in full display in our two-party government. I believe that healthy competition from third parties would shake the Democrats and Republicans out of their complacency and force them to improve, just as healthy competition in the free market often forces competitors to improve their products.
Imagine if Coke and Pepsi had a complete stranglehold on the market for soda, making it next to impossible for competitor brands to be distributed and sold. One can imagine how much nastier the advertising would be between the two companies as they constantly sought to achieve and maintain market dominance. But break up their monopoly and let Dr. Pepper into the market, and lo and behold they have a popular new rival. Faced with a refreshing new alternative, consumers would be much less interested in hearing the tired old Coke-Pepsi attacks, and those two companies would need to find new ways to market their product, usually by improving it.
Perhaps it's a deluded fantasy to think that a multi-party system would achieve the same results, but I don't think so. And it couldn't possibly be worse than the status quo. I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, but in a society like ours that always preaches free speech, choice and competition, it's nothing less than shocking that we tolerate such a stifling, stagnant and increasingly corrupt two-party system.
It is easy enough to see how prophetic Washington's words were, both in his time and in our own. And yet Washington was no naive fool; he himself admitted that party spirit has "its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed" and "within certain limits" political parties do provide "useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty."
My own opinion about political parties--formed reluctantly after years of cynicism and reflection--is that they are a necessarily evil, that for reasons of basic human frailty democratic nations cannot conceivably conduct their public affairs without them. But, knowing that we are doomed to live with them, I believe our country would be much better served by the healthy competition of multiple parties than it is by the stagnant monopoly (or is it duopoly?) of our two-party system. The predictable response to this idea is that "we would just end up like Italy" with a crazy circus of third parties constantly winning and losing power. I disagree. I think Italy's parliament reflects the boisterous nature of a Mediterranean society descended from feuding city-states, while in Northern Europe and particularly in England, from whom we derived our political system, one seldom sees more than a few parties in office at any given time. But even three parties are often a vast improvement over two, as one of the two dominant parties must inevitably seek to build a coalition with the third, usually by making concessions to one of the third party's key issues. If Greens and Libertarians were elected to the U.S. Congress, one could easily imagine occasional partnerships between the Democrats and the Greens on one hand, and the Republicans and the Libertarians on the other, with the result that at least some Green and Libertarian ideas would get passed into law. If nothing else the Republicans might start paying more than mere lip service to the idea of "minimal government" if the Libertarian Party had a visible presence in Congress. As it stands now, voters who favor 1) smaller government, 2) balanced budgets and 3) a better form of taxation (be it a flat income tax or a consumption tax of some kind) have no choice at all other than two parties that will never deliver all three, or even just two of the three. And that's a real pity.
To compound this problem, Democrats and Republicans in all 50 states have erected many insurmountable legal and financial barriers that keep third party candidates from ever having a reasonable chance of being elected. Martin Gross catalogues some of these barriers in The Political Racket.
One might fairly ask me at this point, "Wouldn't electing more parties to office just make party spirit worse by simply multiplying it?" It might, but in fact it usually seems to have the opposite effect. The reason, again, is that the parties have to play nicer when building coalitions. It is the smug arrogance of uncontested power that seems to fuel party spirit more than anything, as we see in full display in our two-party government. I believe that healthy competition from third parties would shake the Democrats and Republicans out of their complacency and force them to improve, just as healthy competition in the free market often forces competitors to improve their products.
Imagine if Coke and Pepsi had a complete stranglehold on the market for soda, making it next to impossible for competitor brands to be distributed and sold. One can imagine how much nastier the advertising would be between the two companies as they constantly sought to achieve and maintain market dominance. But break up their monopoly and let Dr. Pepper into the market, and lo and behold they have a popular new rival. Faced with a refreshing new alternative, consumers would be much less interested in hearing the tired old Coke-Pepsi attacks, and those two companies would need to find new ways to market their product, usually by improving it.
Perhaps it's a deluded fantasy to think that a multi-party system would achieve the same results, but I don't think so. And it couldn't possibly be worse than the status quo. I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, but in a society like ours that always preaches free speech, choice and competition, it's nothing less than shocking that we tolerate such a stifling, stagnant and increasingly corrupt two-party system.
3 comments:
And yet, doesn't there have to be some sort of historical reason why America has pretty much always been a two party system? And the same two-party system since 1856? Putting aside personality-driven parties (Ross Perot, Theodore Roosevelt), why have parties like the Populists and the Socialists appeared, boomed briefly, then pretty much vanished? I personally think it has something to do with the labor movement at the turn of the 20th Century and the fact that agitation for better labor conditions was eventually taken up by the two major parties without the need for a permanent drift of working people into, say, the Socialist camp. Then, in the 30's, the labor cause was more or less permanently entrenched in the Democratic Party. Maybe if, in the 1890's, the Populists had been able to successfully form an alliance between rural farmers and city laborers/immigrants, you might have seen an established Third Party.
Yeah, historically whenever a third party starts to get popular, one of the two major parties will usually adopt its key issue and essentially take the wind out of the third party's sails. That happened as recently as 1992 when Clinton took Perot's issue of deficit reduction and ran with it. Proponents of the two-party system usually use that example to defend the status quo, but I think there's a huge difference between stealing one issue away to deflate a third party and in having that third party actually in office and able to fight for a whole platform of issues completely distinct from the major two parties.
Of course, being the ardent "Tocquevillian" that I am, I also recognize that a government usually tends to reflect the traditions and tastes of the society that spawned it, and it's quite possible Americans would never choose to have more than two parties at any time, even if given the viable option of a third or fourth. Unless we ever reformed our system from winner-takes-all to some form of proportional representation, then we'll almost certainly never see a viable third party.
Great Britain has a "first past the post" system and no proportional representation and they have three relatively stable parties. Canada doesn't have proportional representation at the national level and they have four more or less stable parties. I'm not saying proportional representation is necessarily bad; I'm just saying the lack of it can't be the reason we have a pretty stagnant two-party system in America.
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