Two-Party System: Third Parties Need Not Apply

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There is no clarion call of the American electorate. More profound than both choices suck, I am going to vote for the lesser of two evils, but why don't we have better choices? America is a consumerist society. We are known for having 31 different flavors of coke. And only two candidates. Yet third party candidates almost never get traction in American politics.

Well, thank you again for having me on. So this traces to what I call the third party dilemma. We have a two party system. It's not what the framers of the constitution thought, they set up, they thought that they set up what, what I call a rock paper scissors constitution.

Governance was going to be the checks and balance of the Congress, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Not, they were not considering that it was going to be a battle of political ideologies.

Indeed, and they thought that the system that they set up, we can, we can add. The layer of federalism would break and control what they call the violence of factions. They thought that they had come up with a system to avoid permanently entrenched factions or precursors to what we think of today as parties. But they set in motion, through certain decisions, that they made, an inevitable path toward a two party system. And I think the really important thing for voters to understand is it's not a problem of our individual will.

Sam Why? why is that? why are we set up for a binary? IS? Is it the electoral? is? is the Electoral College the big villain in all this? Because it's the winner.

Yeah, I mean, the Electoral College catalyzes and exacerbates what I believe the institutions don't.

Sam Don't you know I'm not a professor? If you're going to start, it makes it catalyzing and exacerbating. I'm just going to have to leave.

I withdraw. It makes it worse, it makes it worse. You know, there's no electoral college in Congress, in state legislatures, governorship, et cetera. And yet you still have two party dominance all across American history, in those places as well.

DuVErger I'm so sick of that guy mid 20th century.

And he put forth what political scientists call a law, Duverger's Law. That says if you have a system of electoral rules in which you have single member districts, so one person occupies a particular geographical unit, and you decide on who that person is. By plurality voting, not runoffs, not proportionality, it's whoever gets the most votes wins, right? That combination plurality voting and single member districts tends to lead to. This is why it's not really a law, it's just a kind of a rule of thumb. Tends to lead to stable two party systems and makes it very hard for a kind of equilibrium, I'll withdraw equilibrium, multi-party systems that can continue to be competitive.

Isn't that always the big criticism of a third party vote? So there is always a clamoring in American politics for this other choice? I would call it. None of the above and different people represent none of the above. Right now. It's RFK Jr. or it was Ralph Nader, or Jill Stein, or Cornel Wessert.

So that's right. The intuition in our politics is that in order to win, you have to keep your side intact and fracture the opposition. Both sides see that they have to keep their sides intact, fracture the opposition. That leads to two teams, which we call parties, so that dynamic is really deeply embedded.

I have to interrupt very quickly. I think one of you is about to be arrested.

Sorry, I'm in the heart of Washington, D.C. here.

Oh, Sam is about to get hauled away for discussing this very delicate thing. But Max? Then, if the idea is that's what it comes to. Why doesn't the two-party system then function better if the idea is that a third party is anachronistic for the way that this system was designed? Even though the framers maybe didn't intend it that way, and they were. I don't know if you guys know this, Gods amongst men, I don't know if you know. They were infallible, but let's say they didn't do that well. Then why doesn't the two-party system function in a way that doesn't entice people to these third-party options?

Yeah, so I know you're joking when you say gods amongst men, but I do want to say because I know you're joking, and I assume most of you are listening.

No, no, no.

I know that.

I am absolutely joking.

I know that, but I want to make sure everybody understands. One of the things that we have to get over is American exceptionalism. The idea that there was a group of geniuses who happened to meet at a particular time and place, who solved all the problems of democracy. That's not true.

Did they recognize that they had screwed it up?

They did very early on. I mean, you can look at the fact that George Washington's farewell address talks about partisanship, you can see that. Thomas Jefferson, you know?

They became partisan. The very people who created an anti-party constitution formed the first party system in the United States first two-party party system in the 1790s.

By the way, my favorite part of it is they didn't even wait. I think Washington gave the speech about don't do this, don't do this. And like four years later, they were like, All right, we're going to do it.

He had already done it. It was like, a yeah, anyway.

Anyway, tell us what did they already do?

Well, his famous speech against partisanship says a lot of prescient things. It'll invite, it'll make us vulnerable to foreign powers, manipulating our democracy, et cetera. But it was also it was a partisan speech in disguise. It was Alexander Hamilton kind of turning the shiv, trying to make Jeffersonians sound anti-American and opponents of the constitution. Whoa.

That's deep. So Washington, in his sort of above it all, savior of the nation, founder of the nation. And by the way, all I know about this is from watching Hamilton, so everything that I say is from. Apparently everybody rhymed back in the day, but Washington, famously above it all, was actually a. It was a partisan speech elevating the federalists.

Absolutely wow, because there was no. In spite of themselves, they became party builders because they disagreed with each other about governance. And it turned out they, as Max was saying, they were wrong about. They thought that the could create a system to avoid the mischiefs of faction, to avoid parties.

And, in fact, in a. And to avoid dictatorships and to avoid authoritarians.

But, in fact, there are no liberal democracies anywhere that are not, in essential ways, organized by political parties. And they found that that was the case right away. But what, there was nothing. In the 1790s, there was no legitimacy around the idea of permanent, partial, conflicting opposition teams in government that would rotate in and out of power. And so if you make a speech about how bad parties are? That was in part, a way of trying to say. The people who are opposed to our government are in fact against the country, against the Constitution, they're enemies of the Republic.

And one thing I'll just add to that, the first implicit acknowledgement that the framers got it wrong. In the Constitution itself is the 12th Amendment, which for the first time, lets a president and vice president run together on a slate. Otherwise, you ended up with this weird shotgun marriage where you've got a Federalist president, Adams and a Democratic Republican vice President Jefferson. Who hate each other until they love each other later on in life, but end up running against each other.

Yeah, can I tell you, there is nothing better for me than watching professors amen each other.

Yeah, my glasses are fogging up, I'm so excited.

You get a max. But also isn't the first thing that all men are created equal, and they have a provision where some men are three fifths of a man. Like, isn't that also somewhat of acknowledgement of we're created equal? And then literally, the math is different than that within the Constitution.

Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, that's one of three causes that, without mentioning slavery, condone and institutionalize it, you know? So this idea that these people were sort of demigods, I mean, it is deeply troublesome to treat them as though they were carrying tablets down from Sinai, they weren't.

There's a way of putting a positive gloss on that. That, in part, they were not gods, they were fallible men, but also they were victims of being political innovators. We have the oldest continuing, formal democratic constitution in the world. And a lot of what they were developing was kind of sui generis. Things like proportional representation systems hadn't been invented yet.

Why did they decide then? Was there a conversation about a parliamentary system? was there a conversation about, you know, or they just really thought, no? We've devised a system where the different warring factions are the institutions of government, not the ideologies of individuals.

There is some possibility that we could have gone closer to a parliamentary system. But the fact is, they really did think that they were going to break this notion of factions and parties.

Madison in his Virginia Plan Madison's original proposal involved the president being selected by Congress. I mean, there's other things in that scheme as well, but that, in and of itself, is like a pro-parliamentary notion.

I mean, wasn't the election of Jefferson selected by Congress, wasn't that how it went down?

Well, that's because the Electoral College failed for the first of two times that sent the election to Congress, and you ended up with this strange result. And here's the great scene from Hamilton, where Alexander Hamilton actually endorses Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr. And supposedly said, It's a great line. He said I'd rather have a person with the wrong principles than a person with no principles.

No principles. Right, right, boom, come on the room where it happened.

I would say there are these institutes, Max will talk about the other kind of formal institutions that bake it in to a certain extent, right? The parties do. Elected officials, you know, electoral rules are controlled by states and state legislatures. They control things like how many signatures you need to get access to a ballot line.

Even now, to even get on the debate stage, you need 15 percent in four independent polls, and you need to be registered so that you could get 270 electoral votes. It's an incredibly high bar.

Absolutely, and then the flip side, though, is American parties are an entrenched duopoly, but they are also, as organizations, incredibly permeable. They change a lot. It's very easy.

Sometimes they become a family organization.

Exactly, I mean, you're seeing it right now.

You just put your daughter-in-law in there and it becomes an arm of your real estate empire.

But lots of people who aren't in Trump's family kind of acting as if they are kind of his bodyguards, his crew. But let's just say the major parties are flexible organizations that, time and time again, across American history, have adopted some of the priorities, the energies, the movements that had powered third party movements.

They co-opt them, yeah, or they subsume them.

Yeah, but it's not a conspiracy to snuff out all of the actual substance of the third parties. The third parties have huge substantive effects, even though politically and electorally, they don't last.

But it is going back to your question, though. Sometimes the parties fight each other over institutions, but sometimes they agree on institutional outcomes because they have a sort of symbiotic relationship, right? Would they benefit at the expense of third parties? And we see that in certain Supreme Court cases. I don't want to bore you with the details of it. But there are some Supreme Court cases that have really disallowed third parties to challenge their way into being more effective competitors.

Boy, boy, you know what? That's when I'm going to go preach. But clearly, they're not the institution that's going to save it. How many of us can afford Supreme Court justices? Maybe I could get a couple of them, but, you know?

Well, and on this presidential immunity, we're going to find out in the next day just how.

Much you can count on the Supreme Court just as a side note. As presidential historians, the idea that the president, I mean, talk about something that is an utter anachronism or anathema to the Constitution. The idea that the president is a king is the whole reason we fought that war in the first place.

Yeah, well, right, and one thing that we need to. Sam talked about the fact that we have the longest constitution of any nation in the world, which is certainly true. But one thing I encourage people to think about is if you're thinking about the brilliance or wisdom of any system, like an engineering system, business model, musical genre. Would you say, if I can find a single outlier that's lasted longer than others, that must be the best? Or would you say that a system that's been replicated again and again and again, benignly adapted to different situations? That's the test of a really wise and sound system.

We've exported democracy. Wait fails.

Fails.

We have exported democracy around the globe, but we have never once successfully exported two-party presidentialism. That is a model on which we are alone on the stage, for good reason. Most systems that are considered successful democracies have proportional representation and coalition governance, multi-party governance in a proportional representation system, and we reject both of those.

So you're suggesting that they you're talking about the I'm assuming the European model, or the way that, well, there's more than one model.

So we need to be careful about that. It's not as if parliamentary captures all the nuances across systems. One of the things I try to do in my book is take readers on a virtual world tour. I take them to seven countries, not just limited to Europe. But the central lesson of that tour, There's two central lessons of the tour.

Hyperfractic, too many parties, too many parties gets you things like Nazi Germany.

Absolutely.

Where a very fringe party with, I don't know, 27 of the vote can suddenly take over and do all those things. Or Brexit.

Absolutely. So you need to come up with what most political scientists think. The sweet spot somewhere between three to four at the low end, seven to eight at the high end.

So who's got that? Who would you point to? And say, So, Germany? There's a system.

Germany has a system, although they've adapted it a year ago, to make it a little bit different than it had been. But really, post-World War II, Germany was based on a system called Is based on what's called mixed member proportionality. Sorry that it's kind of a mixed member, mixed member proportionality.

I'm sure there's a German word for that.

That's that probably takes a minute and a half to say.

Wiener Schlafenmieter.

Exactly exactly. But the idea is that so they have a two-chamber legislature like we do. The Bundesrat's roughly equivalent to the Senate, the Bundestag's roughly equivalent to the House.

Right, and I think this is. One of the vulnerabilities that Trump exposed of our democracy is that the democracy is held together. Actually, by these hundreds and thousands of administration positions that do things like certify elections, hold elections, and those positions are held by. I'm going to say, partisans, but not ideologues, and what they're trying to do is replace a partisan system with an ideologue system. So that it supercharges the kinds of unfair manipulations of the system to keep yourselves in power and the way I look at it in our system. And Sam, Maybe you can talk about this is, for instance, you look at certain states like Arizona, that's kind of a purple state.

I think the polarized extremism, particularly of Republican state party organizations in a lot of these places, and it's most dramatic, precisely in swing states. In red states. They can kind of ease off the gas pedal a little bit, but it's supercharged in Wisconsin and North Carolina, in Arizona. It's in part a reflection of the weakness of state party organizations and the kind of party organizations at other points in time. And in particular, places in the United States, have been rooted civic organizations that have a real kind of.-.

A foundation of the community, a real-.

Yeah, exactly, both at the state level and then state parties were big actors, particularly in an era in which they controlled delegations at conventions. And they had kind of clout in the national level. And as that recedes as a broader story of the decline of face-to-face civic organizations entirely. What you get is party organizations at the state level and local level. That are usually just kind of empty shells. They become backwaters for local activists, ideologues these days, spun up around national issues.

So all politics are national-.

All politics are national.

And the states are the meth labs of democracy, they're no longer the labs of democracy.

And so that's where you, I mean, the Arizona Republican Party is a great case in point. How insanely trumpy it's gotten it kind of personalized around whatever Trump spun up about. That's what the small number of local activists who control these state parties these days care about as well. And then they'll censure elected officials in their own party if they run afoul of Trump.

And so I think Oklahoma censured Blankford, who was their senator, who was an unbelievably.

And it's like, part of the problem is in the politics, nationalizing so much people's identities as political actors. Being so caught up in national kind of culture. War conflicts means that there's all these. There's subnational issues and policy conflicts that could give rise to much more flexible and fluid. And have in the past coalitions. But, in part, it's a function of organizational decay at the subnational level that you get such polarized state parties.

So basically, the ethos is we've got to own people as opposed to govern. But Max, I want to ask you so the two party system, then, is not the best methodology. American exceptionalism is wrong, even when you look at our political system being the most effective around the world. But what have we done to that two party system to make it even less effective, and how have we hollowed out?

Yes, so one thing that's happened, just a slight difference with Sam on this is, you know? After Barack Obama's first election in 2008. Republican operatives figured out that for pennies on the dollar, they could throw money at. Below the radar. State races in blue and purple states, and basically, if they turned enough of those states red because-.

You're talking about secretary of state and-.

No, no, I'm talking about General Assembly races. And because they draw the congressional maps for the U.S. House of Representatives, they could actually turn their delegations red. And this strategy, which David Daley, he wrote a book called Rat Eft. It's a really fascinating-.

How dare he?

That is the title. And he tells the story. This audacious story of a plan called red Mapping, where essentially the idea is to hyper gerrymander these maps. So that you get entrenched Republican control of the House. They thought they had a lock on it for 30 years, they didn't just flip back in 2019. But when you combine red mapping and blue mapping, here's what we can say about the House of Representatives.

The media is now incentivized for those extremities as well, I mean, it's incentivized for engagement, and engagement is only possible if people are scared or angry. But I would ask you guys, when you talk about red mapping, it doesn't take much of a push to get there. Because going back to again, bringing us back around to the founders, didn't. The way that they designed this as a compromise for slave owners in the South who did not have the kinds of population, you know. How do you create a democratic system where people's voices matter when one side of the country really doesn't have that many people who are considered people?

Absolutely absolutely true. The Senate is the single most anti-democratic institution of any institution in a country that claims to be a democracy. If you add up the population of the 21 lowest population states, so they get 42 of the Senate, it equals California, which gets 2 of the Senate.

By the way, I think that's the right call, I don't know if you've been out there, but it's probably the right call. A lot of weed shops, a lot of weed shops, all right, we will be right back.

It's egregious. The problem is that fixing the Senate won't fix our problem.

And the other problem is to even fix any of those systems, whether it's, you know, there's the direct vote, or there's the changes in the electoral system. Needs 75 of the states. And nobody is going to cede power. When you have a system that's designed more for minority rule, who is going to cede that power?

I do just want to kind of point out.

Do we have a professor? Fight brewing? Are you going to come?

Well, I will say that yes. If you look at the United States Senate, it's gerrymandered for white, rural voters, that's, that's correct, but it's also a polarized chamber, and there is no gerrymandering in the Senate. You know what I mean, which is just to say.

But it is not as polarized as the House. It's true, I can tell you, from spending time in the Senate and spending time in the House, the house is the wild bus, of course.

Sticker and witness Landry, as we were just talking about, he's now the party. But the same trends of there was. There was over the course of the 20th century, very deep ideological divisions within the parties, especially in the Democratic Party. You had. The most conservative white supremacists in the country were a pivotal faction in the new deal Democratic Party, that, and then there was.

Have a clear choice. We just don't particularly think either choice represents our interest. I mean, the two parties could not be more different, there is no question.

Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that underneath these two parties, we really naturally have roughly five to six parties.

So the Republicans talking about how that and those are represented like Freedom Caucus.

Yeah, I mean, well. Another way to think of it is if we actually had the system that I advocate, which would generate a true multiparty system. The Republicans would probably fracture to the traditional Conservatives or GOP, and kind of the MAGA or America First Party. The Democrats would split between traditional center left Democrats and progressives. There probably is a Green party, there might be a Libertarian party, so we naturally have six parties.

But how do you? how do you limit it? Because wouldn't? Then everybody say, Well, I'm. I'm a little bit at odds with the Libertarian Party, so I'm going to start the Green Libertarians.

So the way you limit it is to devise a system that generates neither too few parties like the U.

You're saying too many, those are too many.

So you've got the risks on both sides. You want to hit that sweet spot, and mixed member proportionality does that. The reason is because.

Explain mixed member proportionality again so that I understand the sweet spot.

So you vote in a constituency election, one ballot, and you vote by party. So let's take Washington State. Washington has 10 seats in the House of Representatives. My scheme would double it, the House of Representatives double the size, and we use mixed number proportionality.

Imagine that they would get 20 seats.

They would get 20 seats, so imagine in the district seating, they get five Democrats and five Republicans, and imagine that in the party proportional votes, four parties each get 25 percent. We'll just arbitrarily say, progressives, the Democrats, the Republicans and America first all get 25 percent. Now what happens is the Democrats and Republicans each got five seats already.

How many representatives would we have in Congress?

We would have double, we would double the size of the House, which is for political buy-in, 870, 870. This is for political buy-in purposes, which I can explain.

So we need to build a bigger building.

Yeah, if the worst problem the United States faces is better architecture for the U.

Now, Sam, I would say, that's probably not your solution, so where would you land on how we fix this kind of thing?

Well, look, I think people should go out and buy Max's book and read it, they should buy my book.

I'll second that.

Because?

I'll third it.

Because precisely on this exceptionalism, it's like, Americans just don't realize that. There are democracies that work really well all over the world. And they have huge variations in how their systems work, and none of them look like ours, and people should take a look.

You believe it could be positive, but impossible? Well, yeah.

And so I do think.

You look at how to fix or how to ameliorate what we have now. OK, so what would you do then within that?

It is in part, also by writing books and trying to spread the good news in this point about just like. People should recognize that. Political parties as institutions, which everyone loves to denigrate, including the parties themselves, are in fact, kind of the essential cornerstone of all democracies everywhere and always have been. And that what you need to do is if you are a politically engaged person, if you're motivated to follow politics, to go out and do things, you should conduct your political activism with a frame of mind of how am I participating in a constructive way building up effective party organizations? That usually means.. ..

I mean, that is like the Tea Party, that is what they did. I wouldn't necessarily say that was productive for governance, but it's certainly what you're talking about. But beyond the idea of us being better people or better citizens, it feels like, so we come down to the two things and I guess we can sort of wrap on this.

So let me say this one area where Sam and I have profound agreement, and a lot of people in this space don't agree with the two of us. We are both pro-party reformers. we both believe it is essential to have vital parties in a democracy. In fact, I'll even say....

And they are not vital right now, they are hollowed out.

Correct? There's only one way to have a country without parties, and that's to have a dictator declare all other parties illegal. So really, the antithesis of parties is dictatorship, and so you have to have parties. The question is, how do you make parties do the effective work for the citizenry?

But it doesn't necessarily address how they would govern. Then does it?

And mine's the only proposal that actually allows every sitting member of the House and Senate to keep their jobs. And so when people say, is it realistic to reform, it is if you can actually compare it to other proposals and come up with a solution that lets every sitting member of the House and Senate keep their jobs and allow them to become the heroes of democracy. And in my book, I explain how that's possible.

Oh, good luck there. Yeah, I mean, I've seen those.

But if the alternative is to get rid of them,-.

Right, but, Sam, to that point, would you suggest that this is?

I come down on the former. I do try, particularly to students, to emphasize the story here is not fundamentally a cynical conspiracy, the story is-.

A lot of people well tell RFK Jr. that they're keeping him out of the debate.

A lot of people are more so now than ever because we're in a very ideologically polarized time. People are sincerely motivated in what they're doing, most of them think what they're doing is good for the country. It is the ill fit between what have become much more ideologically sorted, polarized parties, two of them, and a constitutional system that we haven't talked to. The other distinction between parliamentary systems and presidential ones is it's in presidential systems. Separation of power systems that you get divided government, that you get chronic gridlock. When one party controls, it's the ill fit of.

Oh yeah.

Things about like-.

That hypercharges the poor design of the Senate, no question.

And it makes it impossible again, talk about an outlier. There's no country on Earth where there's this unbelievably unrepresentative second chamber that you have to get a super majority of that second. It gives the opposition party veto power.

It's most important, I think, if I want to have everybody take something away from this conversation, it would be that. Because that, what you both brought up, I think, is something I had not thought about at all. Which is, our country is an absolute outlier. We consider ourselves a shining city on a hill of democratic excellence and a model to the world. And what you're saying is, not only are we not that our system is actually one of the least functional democratic systems of any of the others. Whether you want to call it a democratic system, or a constitutional republic, or a constitutional republic that lays out a democratic system of representation. We're one of the least functioning, and we don't even consider that.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, I think. If your listeners or viewers take that lesson and internalize it and just begin to question it, one of the hardest things is to begin questioning the things that you were taught as a child.

We all went to school. No, I'm serious about that. No man. I totally agree. That's such a great point. I completely. It's that whole nostalgia of America was the best, and they always name that time when they were seven years old.

The time I cannot allow myself to stay neutral is when I teach undergrads. I teach a book by Robert Dahl called How Democratic is the U?

Well, guys, I so appreciate it. Max Stearns, Law Professor, University of Maryland, CarY School of Law, author of Parliamentary America The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy. Sam Rosenfeld, associate professor of Political Science at Colgate and the co-author with Daniel Schlotzman of The Hollow Parties, The many past and disordered present of American Party Politics. I urge you to buy both books and then you have. By then, I'm gonna say three weeks to fix our two-party representative democracy. Gentlemen, thank you so much for a fascinating conversation and-.

Thank you so much for having us.

Helping me see some things that I really hadn't thought about, so thank you guys.

Thank you.

Boy did I enjoy that. I feel like I got a real I don't know what you call it like. AP History course on there. But when he said our democracy, when he was talking about it being replicated, I thought he was gonna go. Our democracy has been replicated all around the world. It's the most successful form of government. He's like, nobody's replicated and nobody wants to, because it doesn't work.

Woo-hoo.

Democracy saved bye-bye.

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