The 2-Party Canard

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine defends the two-party system in America. He gets it completely wrong. Here is the core of his argument:

When it comes to the presidency, only one person can win. When it comes to Congress, for that matter, only two parties can efficiently win, given our system of majorities and supermajorities needed to get the work of the people done and given the fact that governments won't fall because of any legislature's failures or whims and given the size of the country and the cost of running for office and marketing a message here. The same system operates down to the state and local levels.

And that system works. It is more stable and effective than any other you can name.

But, again, the system forces us to make a choice. We get a long time to make that choice. We get a long (albeit too long and too expensive) campaign season to push and support (and defeat) candidates. We get to push special-interest candidates to push the agendas they represent. That is how we build coalitions; that is how diverse interests get represented; that is how change erupts. That is why, for example, Al Sharpton and Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman, losers all, are telling people voters that the best way to change the system and get represented is to do it from within the party, not without. They all tried to win the top spot. But they lost. Yet they all believe they influenced the debate and the election and the winners. So votes for them were still votes for the left and not votes discarded.
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[T]the system works. The two-party system works.

Sharpton, Dean and Lieberman "are telling people voters [sic] that the best way to change the system and get represented is to do it from within the party, not without" because they are partisans. They are, first and foremost, representatives of their political party, not represenatives of the voters as a whole, or of the country as a whole. Sadly, even some of the people elected President only represent their party in real terms. Some people cannot rise above that. (Nixon and Clinton are the two most obvious recent examples.)

But none of the stability of our system comes from the number of parties we have. If we had 25 parties in the House and 8 in the Senate, with varying numbers of representatives and senators, the system would not destabilize. Any given bill would either be voted on by a majority of each chamber, and thus pass, or would not, and thus fail. The stability of our system comes from the fact that the executive is not a subset and servant of the legislative, and thus the President cannot be removed by the legislature for failing to do what the legislature wants done. (See Italy between 1950 and 1980) for an example of how this works when a few major and a large number of minor parties have fundamental, unbridgable differences can paralyze a government in a parliamentary system.

So let's look at some hypotheticals. To make it easy, we'll use three parties, assume strict party discipline (bye bye Chaffee, McCain and Miller), and only consider the Senate. Party A has 48 senators, party B has 38 senators and party C has the remaining 14 senators.

Hypothetical 1 - Committee assignments: It's time for the organizing sessions. Absent dealmaking, each party will vote for its own, and no one will get the required majority; so there'll be dealmaking. Party C could throw in with either A or B, and that would create the majority needed to assign chairmanships and such. So both A and B would be compelled to offer a good deal to C. Alternatively, if C turned out to be, say, the American Nazi party or the Black Panther party, A and B could band together to deny any effective power to C. In other words, some kind of deal would be made, and committee assignments would be handed out. If A were to offer the best deal to C, but were to do something antithetical to C during the course of the legislative session, C could "defect" to B, thus changing the committee memberships and assignments. This happens now, but rarely. (The last example I can think of was Jim Jeffords' move from Republican to independent.) But even if this happened, the courts would still go on with the law they had before, and the executive would still consider with the power and budget it had before.

Hypothetical 2 - Advise and consent: The President submits a judge or a treaty for the approval of the Senate. The Senate votes. No difference from now, except that it is likely that the President would have to give some concessions to one or more parties (such as placing some of their members as cabinet secretaries) in order to get other choices approved.

Hypothetical 3 - Lawmaking: There would have to be more deals in order to get a bill passed. The largest party would still need minor-party support to get bills passed, so the amount of pork in the budget would likely go up. On the other hand, it's likely that fewer bills would get passed, causing a net increase in personal liberty. The lawmaking process would get harder to follow as it happened, but there wouldn't be any substantive differences from a 2-party system.

Hypothetical 4 - Impeachment: Given the fact that the Vice President is elected on the same ticket as the President, a party coup is not possible (the President would be replaced with a member of the same party if the President were removed). As a result, impeachments would likely continue to be extraordinary events, and convictions likely still unheard of.

The dynamic of the House would be similar, if more contentious.

The presidential elections would differ in important ways, presuming that the parties had different amounts of influence in different regions. In particular, the electoral college would suddenly take on a vast new relevance, and people would begin to understand its true relevance to our system (which relevance is masked by having a winner-take-all two-party system). Likely, the presidential candidates would have to do considerably more reaching outside their party bases. On the good side, this would encourage moderation, while on the bad side, it could encourage blatant pandering.

But in sum, there would not be a destabilization of the system. The president would continue to be elected as he is now, and would serve outside the vicissitudes of any turmoil in the legislature, while the legislators themselves would continue to pass laws, just with more effort required.

The stability of our political system is not because we don't have more than two major parties; it's because we don't have a parliamentary system.

Frankly, there's only one point of agreement between me and Nader: our votes are not the inherent right of any given political party. They have to earn them, and when they fail us, we should look elsewhere.

Actually, British author Douglas Adams had a great take on this. In one of his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, he noted a system with lizards and robots. The lizards were in power and horribly oppressed the robots. But it wasn't a dictatorship; it was a true republic. Why did the robots keep voting in the lizards? Because if they voted for the robot, the wrong lizard might win.

Posted by Jeff at February 25, 2004 02:51 PM | Link Cosmos