Osher classes sometimes live beyond their scheduled dates. Over the past couple of years, I have had some opportunities to give short presentations to local community groups based on classes I have taught for the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at William and Mary. I’m writing about this today because I’m giving one of those presentations tomorrow night.
A few years ago I taught a class called It’s Party Time; I wrote about this course on July 12 of this blog series, if you want to check it out again. I taught it a second time a year later. Both times I taught this class in a large auditorium that held 150 people or so. That means probably 300 people in Williamsburg were part of one of those classes.
Now, that’s not a huge number. But it is apparently large enough that it comes to mind when people are trying to figure out who to ask to speak at their community organizations. Any of you who have been in charge of trying to get speakers for a community group know what I’m talking about. Back in August, I gave a condensed version of this talk to a group at a local senior living facility, Patriot’s Colony, about a five-minute drive from my house. I’m giving the talk again tomorrow night at a local church that is hosting a series of civic conversations.
Each of these presentations lasts about an hour, including time for a few questions. In both situations, the sponsors of the talk were interested in my perspective on the upcoming midterm elections and the role the American political party plays in the political system.
Here’s the gist of my presentation: there are good reasons why the American people don’t care for our political party system. It’s not because our parties are too strong; rather, it’s because the parties are too weak. They don’t perform the functions of parties.
Parties are supposed to select candidates to run under their party banner. In America today, it is more often the case that candidates circumvent the party leadership and run under the label, no matter what the party leaders think. This is due in part to the increase in the number of states that select candidates through a primary election, where the voters, not the party, determine who the nominees are. This is the way Trump was successful in 2016, while the mainstream of the Republican Party tried desperately to defeat him. On the other side, Bernie Sanders tried to hijack the nomination of a party he did not belong to (and he almost succeeded). We see woefully incompetent GOP candidates all over the ballots in this year’s midterms, and the GOP is put in the position of defending the indefensible. Party leaders would not have chosen Mehmet Oz, J.D. Vance, or Herschel Walker, but the GOP is stuck with them.
Parties are supposed to run campaigns. But with the deluge of campaign contributions that come from outside the party channels, candidates find themselves beholden to special interests and not to their political party. This means that candidates, once elected, pay more attention to the interests of their mega-donors than they do to their party leadership. In addition, the rise of social media has given candidates ways to communicate with voters that do not rely on the party’s messaging and campaign structure, rendering parties even more irrelevant.
Parties are supposed to lay out a set of policies that they stand for. The Democratic Party issued a 93-page platform before the 2020 election, explaining in detail what their goals would be if they won. You may not agree with the Democrats’ goals, but you know what the party stands for. The GOP didn’t put out a platform in 2020, instead saying that they stood by Trump’s America First agenda – whatever that is. They have apparently decided that there is now a fourth branch of government, and he lives in Florida. They read the latest smoke signals from Mar-A-Lago and pretend that it’s what they’ve always wanted to do. The Commitment to America that the GOP released recently is a vague statement of goals without details about how to achieve them. This allows their supporters to interpret the GOP goals in any way that suits them, and allows the party to dismiss any disagreement with the goals by saying “that’s not what we mean.”
Parties are supposed to be held responsible for accomplishing their goals once they are elected to office. But it is too often the case in the American political system that the various law-making parts of the government – the House, Senate, and the Presidency – are controlled by different political parties. In the not-so-distant past (before the 1990s), compromise was the name of the game. But since then, hyper-partisanship has increasingly characterized the legislative process, with the result that elected officials face a difficult and obstructive process in carrying out their stated goals.
So it’s not hard to understand why party identification in the United States is declining and the number of voters who identify as independents is on the increase. Is there a solution?
I can’t answer that question. But I do know that one solution that is often proposed – that we need a third political party – is not the answer.
The type of political party system a country has is dependent on several underlying institutional and organizational factors. In a country like the US, where these underlying factors inevitably lead to a two-party system, you can’t just decree the existence of a third party – you have to change the underlying factors, and that’s extremely difficult bordering on impossible.
The nation’s electoral system determines (to a great extent) what kind of party system it has. The electoral system in the United States is a plurality system, where the person with the most votes wins and anyone with less than that gets nothing. In most countries where there is a robust multi-party system, the system thrives because the country has a proportional representation system – a party wins seats in the legislature, for example, in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote it receives. In this situation, the party that comes in second – or even third – still gets a piece of the action and lives to fight another election.
The nation’s institutional structure has a great deal to do with how effective the parties are in carrying out their promises. In a presidential system like the one in the US, the kind of “divided government” I mentioned earlier is common. President Obama controlled the House and Senate for only four years; President Trump had this advantage for only two years. This would not happen in a parliamentary system, where the chief executive (usually called the Prime Minister) is selected by the majority party in the legislature. For good or for ill, the party in power can usually pass legislation that mirrors its promises.
In the United States, the courts have been loath to restrict campaign spending, insisting instead that the money = speech, and thus that campaign contributions are protected under the First Amendment. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC extended this protection to corporations, saying that corporations had free speech rights as if they were persons. This vitiated most campaign finance laws and has created a situation where wealth buys political power, and not much else matters. The parties continue to raise money and dole it out to candidates, but the PACS run by corporations and billionaires have almost unlimited amounts of money to give to candidates who will do their bidding once in office. The party runs a poor second to these outside interests.
Under these conditions, it’s almost impossible for a “third party” to gain traction unless one of the existing parties simply collapses. That happened in the 1820s and the 1850s, but it hasn’t happened since.
Other people suggest that we should do away with political parties altogether, and have everyone run as an independent. One thing they all cite in their arguments is that the framers of our Constitution famously railed against the “spirit of party,” warning against the emergence of permanent political factions. It’s true, this is what they believed. But they believed this because they didn’t know how modern representative democracies would work. It’s not because they were stupid – it was because they were in the process of creating the first truly representative democracy, and they couldn’t predict the future.
Political parties are here to stay. You can look around the globe and back through history – you won’t find a functional modern representative government that operates without political parties. Parties are the way you form stable governing majorities in a representative democracy. There is no other way.
A lot of political conversations in the US today veer in the direction of “we just need to get rid of political parties” or “we need new political parties.” That is a silver bullet approach – the assumption that there is one magical decision we can make and it will all be fixed. This isn’t the way political change happens. Our politics is in disarray because our political parties are too weak, not because they’re too strong. We need to strengthen them by making them essential to the process of selecting candidates, running campaigns, making commitments to voters, and then fulfilling these commitments. That requires hard work and a better understanding among voters of what’s going to be required. None of it fits on a bumper sticker.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Got that right. Good piece.