Dean Esmay offers a hypothetical situation:
Let’s pretend that the election of 2004 is the worst-imaginable in the entire history of the Democratic Party. Not only does Bush win re-election, but Republicans win every race–every single race–nationwide in America. Every House race, every Senate race, every governorship, all of them.
I don’t just mean the “competitive” races. I mean, the completely impossible happens, and Republicans win every race, everywhere they’ve fielded a candidate.
I grant you, I am positing the impossible. This is a thought-experiment. But tell me: what happens as a result?
I think his answer is a correct one, based on what’s happened the last two or three decades when one party or the other has actually seized control of the White House and Congress at the same time.
And, yes, you can play the same game with the Democrats, and get largely the same answer.
Smirk
Karl Rove’s wetdream…
Ok, I am assuming that he thinks that some moderate GOPers would actually get elected. If it hasn’t happened already there is a very low probability of it happening under that scenario as well.
What the most likely scenario is, is what has already happened over the past twenty years. This is the “Dixie-Crats” moving to, what is seen as a more hospitable environment/party – the GOP.
This scenario would happen in reverse, the moderate east coast GOPers would move to the Democratic Party.
The reason why we have two parties is because unlike other democracies we have two named coalitions (and Sen. Jeffords and Rep. Sanders who assocaite with the Democrats) and the other democracies do not name their coaltions but rather the components of them. Our approach is more stable because the coalitions do not shift all the time (case in point, Italy). We have two parties because we historically have been that way. (I know this sounds like a tautology but it really isn’t.) If we became one party, we would splinter into more than two parties, and we would lose our political stability. Look at the recent democracies coming out of the old Soviet blok. None of them became two-party states. You only get to a two-party system if you start there.
It’s an intersting question in political philosophy. There have tended to be only two significant, stable parties at any given time in US history. Is that a cultural thing, or a coincidence? Dean’s thesis seems to be that the broad tent nature of both parties is such that if one of them were to be substantially defeated and discredited, it would lead to internecine warfare inside the survivor, between various factions within those big tents, leading to — again — two basic parties.
I think there’s something to be said for his idea. Certainly when either the Republicans or Dems have dominated Capitol Hill, or both it and the White House, it’s seemed like less has gotten done, since the “party faithful” no longer need to band together, and can instead pursue their own agendas. And such dominations have tended to be shortlived.
Given that much of our system is winner-take-all (the electoral college, for example), there seems little basis for a formal coalition government of the sort that’s led to instability in such places as Italy (or Israel). In a setup such as ours, I’m not sure you can have more than two distinct, significant parties for any length of time.
Well, as has happened in the past, one of the major parties cherry picks the various ideas of the minor parties and incorporates them in to their platform.
My point is once you have a two party system, it sticks. But, if you have a multi-party system or one-party system, it is very difficult to get to a two-party system. Here’s why:
If you have a multi-party system you do not establish the rules where any one party can gain the upper hand without the aid of another. Once you have a colation of 50 percent plus one, then you rule the roost. If you have a one-party system you establish the rules to gut the “loyal opposition”.
If you have a two-party sytem you do not have winner-take-all but winner-takes-all with an escape hatch. That is because you know that your party will someday be in the minority. Thus, all the fillibuster rules of the Senate don’t get voted out. The Republicans could have done the “nuclear option” on the Estrada nomination to break the fillibuster. But, they didn’t because the Democrats will be in control someday.
If there is a structural reason for the U.S. two party system it is not the electoral college. That only explains the presidency and note the elections decided by the House in the Nineteenth Century. The President did not need to be a member of any party then. There is a reason why the two party system is predominately a Twentieth Century phenomenon. Originally, the House was set up to preserve the majority states rights and the Senate the minority states. When you add to it the Seventeenth Amendment and what was originally set up to preserve the rights of minority states preserves the rights of national minority parties. Since 1913, any third party was doomed. The cloture vote was first tested in 1919 and that enpowered the second-place party as long as they had the sufficient strength (originally 33% but is 40% since 1975). If you don’t have 40%, you don’t have enough power. The effect of these two provisions sealed the deal for the two-party system. The key to the two-party system is not the Presidency, it is the Senate.
I believe Rich is mistaken. Especially because the U.S. has had multi-party situations several times in the past, the most dramatic of which was in 1860, where we were effectively a four-party country. They collapsed again into two within a decade or so: the Democrats and the newly-formed Republicans.
Thomas Jefferson observed that, while he abhored political parties, it was an inevitability that the American system would evolve into a two-party system. He was correct. There are a multitude of factors that cause this, but the main two reasons are the first-past-the-post system we use for picking winners, and, probably even more important, the enormous power granted to the executive branch. A tertiary factor is the bicameral legislature and the power concentrated on Senators.
The fact is that you cannot afford to be in a third party in this country because it virtually guarantees that the largest party, whatever it is, will capture vastly more power than you can get as loser–there will be no “shadow cabinets,” no coalitions you can form to defeat the executive on a bill he wants. Prime Ministers face that regularly, but not Presidents (or Governors, in most states). Further, both the Senate and the Presidency make forming regional coalitions extremely difficult.
Thus, both parties always have their main eye on the executive, and generally speaking, most people would rather have someone they don’t like much than someone they despise.
The two-party system is an inevitability because of the design of our system, and of human nature. If we fractured into three parties–which we arguably did in 1992, or when Teddy Roosevelt formed his Bull Moose Party–what always happens is that one of the big parties nabs its most popular ideas. Most don’t realize this but, for example, the wildly successful Contract With America (and it was wildly successful by the way–Clinton wound up signing most of it even while he claimed he was fighting against it) came almost entirely from Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Republicans felt they’d lost in ’92 due in part to that party, so they grabbed most of its issues and made them its own.
If the Greens get to be enough of a problem for Democrats, they’ll do the same thing if they can.
Third parties can never, ever be more than players on the edge in American politics. Voters AND politicians know instinctively that they’d rather have an executive they don’t love rather than one they hate. Coalitions thus always form within the two parties.
Note, by the way, that it’s worked this way for 200 years so far, and every time there’s been either a fracture in one of the big parties, or a serious third-party threat, the system has always collapsed back to two parties again within a decade at most.
It has always been so, and will always be so absent major structural reforms of the Constitution. Which I, myself, would oppose, because I’ve come to apreciate the stability and moderating effects that our system gives us–as frustrating as it might be when I want major changes.
Oh, I should clarify, when I said, no coalitions you can form to defeat the executive on a bill he wants, I should have been more clear. In Parliamentary systems, the Prime Minister must regularly ask for votes on issues that Presidents of the United States may simply issue as executive orders, with no need for any vote at all. The President can also unilaterally shoot down any item of legislation, with it being a very rare and difficult process to overrule him.
So while, yes, obviously, you can defeat the President on many bills he may want, he has vastly more autonomy than any Prime Minster. (Although Prime Ministership has advantages of its own when it comes to certain kind of legislating—but we needn’t go there now.)
There is another hsitorical factor to consider and that was Andrew Jackson. Up until that point, the presidential veto was reserved for what the President considered unconstitutional bills. Jackson vetoed for other reasons and greatly increased the power of the presidency. Because of the threat of a veto, the minority party gained statute because they were needed to override a presidential veto.
The 1860s were really an aberration because they started with four parties and ended with effectively one along with an attempted coup of Andrew Johnson. Since the Radical Republicans had the expectation that they would remain in power, they did everything they could to crush the new minority.
I am still looking for the paper, but I recall a poly-sci study that showed that greater than two-way races cause unpredictable results. Next stop: California.