Virtually nobody in America is happy with the politics of the present age. Though we disagree about pretty much everything, we can all agree on that. It is what to do about it that tends to divide. In his bracing new book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, Lee Drutman offers a bold solution: We must replace the two-party system with a multiparty enterprise by instituting ranked-choice voting.
For Drutman, the problem with American politics is that the two major political parties are locked in a zero-sum game, neither willing nor able to compromise. As an alternative, he advocates for ranked-choice voting in multimember House districts and ranked-choice voting for the Senate. The technical details of the proposal are outside the scope of this review, but Drutman explains them well and persuasively. Put simply, they would probably transform our two-party system into a multiparty system, as voters would have more than two viable alternatives. This would take us closer to European democracies, as well as what he calls the “hidden four party system” of the postwar era, which he thinks was a superior system.
There is a lot to praise about the book. The narrative is engaging and the writing vigorous, which is especially impressive for such a relatively dry subject. Drutman’s history of the U.S. party system is fast-moving and generally pretty solid, although it relies a bit too heavily on Democratic pieties of the last 60 years (the postwar Democratic embrace of civil rights, for instance, is not nearly as clear-cut as he makes it out to be). Drutman also draws upon a wide range of scholarly research, from James Madison’s political thought to the debates among academics over the function of party to the technical ins-and-outs of ranked-choice voting to a comparative view of parliamentary-style democracy. I personally identify with his credo: “I’m a political scientist by training, but a reformer at heart.” It is nice to discover a fellow traveler on what seems like a lonely road.
Nevertheless, I find myself unpersuaded by his thesis, which perhaps speaks to the fact that for all their many faults, the two parties do represent a deep divide in American politics. Drutman argues that his idea is not a “radical proposal,” but I believe it is. After all, the Democratic and Republican Parties have been the two dominant political coalitions since 1854. It is a big deal to upend them.
The question is of one’s faith in what Madison and Alexander Hamilton called the “science of politics,” of which Drutman is a firm and fast believer. It is an old question from the Enlightenment: Just how far can reason go in reshaping society? Madison, at least the young Madison of 1787, was supremely confident that his abstract theories of government were the cure for what ailed the nation. He essentially wanted to defang the state governments, vesting the national government with sweeping power based on popular representation in both chambers of Congress.
As we all know, he did not get his way. The Constitutional Convention compromised by giving the House to Madison and the Senate to skeptics of proportional representation who favored a smaller central government. Yet we often overlook the wise argument that John Dickinson of Delaware made against Madison’s sweeping calls for reform. Like the aristocracy of Great Britain, Dickinson claimed, the states had been an essential part of the national political fabric. They could not just be torn out. If the proposed Constitution was the solar system, Dickinson argued, then the states should be the “planets, and ought to be left to move freely in their proper orbits.”
I was reminded of Dickinson when reading Drutman’s book. Georgia, the last of the 13 colonies, was founded in 1733, 55 years before the Constitutional Convention. The Republican Party is the younger of the two major parties and was founded some 166 years ago. This means that our current two-party system is more ancient to us than all the states except Virginia were to the delegates at the Constitutional Convention.
The question is: Do you or I, does Drutman or anybody else, fully understand the role of the two parties well enough to foresee the consequences of such a major reform? I think not. I lack sufficient faith in the “science of politics.”
Drutman’s narrative, as engaging as it is, does not dislodge me of my skepticism. First, I am not at all certain that the party system is the major cause of our current problems. What about a lack of civic virtue, a willingness of the people to think about their self-interest, rightly understood? What about a dearth of good statesmanship? What if neither side has good enough ideas to address our problems in a broadly republican manner? One could go on listing alternatives, many of which are as likely to be the cause of our troubles as is the two-party system.
Second, Drutman does not sufficiently consider the mistakes of past reformers. Previous efforts to reform the political process have often done as much harm as good. One could list a long train of ill effects from the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 or the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — enough to make anybody stumble at the threshold of sweeping change. Generally speaking, interest groups and billionaires have come to dominate politics partly as a result of changes reformers made to existing law, which created unanticipated loopholes for corporate America to exploit. I worry that the kind of sweeping changes Drutman proposes could have similar unanticipated consequences. A more prudent course for reformers would be modestly tweaking existing institutions and then carefully studying the effects. That is, after all, how science is supposed to work.
Third, Drutman ignores the parties’ capacity to evolve over time. He argues that they are stuck in a negative feedback loop from which they cannot escape. But have they not escaped before? The nastiness of the 1790s gave way to the “Era of Good Feelings” in the 1810s and ‘20s. The post-Civil War fight between the Radical Republicans and Andrew Johnson gave way to the muddled politics of the 1880s. Parties change all the time, even when the electoral system remains the same. One cannot explain change with a constant. This reinforces the case for modest changes. Is it really impossible to nudge our politics back onto a more benevolent course?
Drutman is a liberal and I am a conservative. Confident in the capacity of man’s reason to reshape society, he is willing to take a leap in the dark. I am not. He is a Tom Paine and I am an Edmund Burke. We are both reformers by temperament, but of opposite parties, of which there are basically two.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
