Are Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump really the two best candidates for America’s most demanding and important jobs? It’s unlikely. Trump tried to overturn the last election. And while Harris will be a regression to the mean after the inept Trump and aging Joe Biden, she is far from the most effective executive in the country.
So why are these two presidential candidates?
The answer is America’s two-party system. Although third parties may occasionally make noise, they never threaten the Democratic-Republican duopoly.
That’s exactly what America’s founders feared. George Washington warned against having only two political parties. “The alternating domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to partisan discord, has in various ages and countries committed the most terrible outrages, and is itself a terrible tyranny. “It is a principle.”
According to Washington, competing political parties “serve to organize factions and give them artificial and extraordinary power.” It is to put the will of a political party in place of the delegated will of the people. ”
John Adams believed that the two-party system was a serious threat to the republic, stating that “the division of the republic into two parties…is to be feared as a great political evil.”
In fact, the fewer tribes there are, the worse tribalism becomes. And in America, these two political tribes fight each other and just each other every day. This conflict amplifies prejudice, distorts political debate, alienates policy platforms, impedes compromise and negotiation, and produces substandard or underqualified government officials.
What currently dominates American politics is a very backward approach of hating the other person more than you hate yourself. An October 2020 study published in Science, “Political Sectarianism in America,” highlights this new paradigm. And at a similar rate. ” A recent study continues, “This disgust exceeded love for co-partisans.”
This explains a lot. Hatring Trump to the core makes his opponent Harris appear to be a better candidate than he actually is. And vice versa.
The problems created by the existence of just two political parties are exacerbated. As Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, explained in 2020: They are now truly clear. This goes back to the 2010 midterm elections. Until then, the parties had enough overlapping majorities that the kind of negotiation and coalition building that is natural to multiparty democracies could function within the two-party system. No more. “
Having more diverse political parties would help. It would reinvigorate the mainstream political debate with additional perspectives, as many important ideas are currently absent from either side’s platform. The introduction of new ideas and coalitions will reduce stubborn partisanship and give politicians an incentive to respect empirical reality rather than just reflexively appeasing their constituencies. As Drutman put it, a multiparty system would be “more fluid and responsive to Americans’ political preferences” and help “eliminate binary partisan tensions.”
To be sure, having more political parties won’t solve everything. The concrete platform of the new party will be the key. The deadlock will likely continue in Congress. Tribalism and social media echo chambers will never go away. And other flaws in the political system will remain.
But a vibrant multiparty system would directly address the biggest problems in American politics: tribal tensions and irrational partisanship. This more rational and diverse political system would make elections less about party loyalty and more about individual ability.
And it is likely to produce the most qualified presidential candidate for the job. Very different from what we have now.
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t. He originally wrote this article for Fulcrum (thefulcrum.us), a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform focused on fixing governance systems. The Fulcrum is a project of Issue One (issueone.org), a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce the role of money in politics, but is editorially independent.
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