Thanks to unrestricted primaries, the parties are remarkably open things.
Bashing the American two-party system never goes out of style, but at present it seems trendier than usual. A populist age begets fresh animosity for partisan traditions.
In the New York Times, David Brooks portrays the system as something contrary to the diversity of American life. “There are over 6,000 breweries in America,” he complains, “but when it comes to our politics, we get to choose between Soviet Refrigerator Factory A and Soviet Refrigerator Factory B.” In a column entitled “The Third Party Option,” he makes the case for an explicitly “radical” presidential candidate with unorthodox opinions capable of outshining the other two. Fellow conservative Henry Olsen echoes similar sentiments, arguing for a “National Party,” bearing a unique platform whose understandings of life, liberty, and the state transcend the conventional constraints of American partisanship.
On the opposite end, Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman argues for a new leftist party defined by structure and discipline. Like many on the hard left, he bemoans a Democratic party indifferent to socialism, but he considers this fate primarily a byproduct of America’s insufficiently “stringent” party hierarchies. Ackerman is encouraged by leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are tied to organizations such as Democratic Socialists of America, which impose more “consistent ideological and programmatic coherence.” He regards this as one of the most admirable qualities of political parties in other nations as well and envies them for it.
But the structure of America’s parties makes them far less unrepresentative of American public opinion than they are charged as being. If American parties seem unsatisfying to their critics, those critics should redirect their displeasure to the voters who select the men and women who lead them.
American parties are remarkably open things. Their most significant hiring decisions are made by the Americans who choose to vote in their primaries. That Democratic and Republican politicians often proceed to discriminate against lesser parties with ballot-access laws and so forth can’t hide the reality that even a party rigging things in its favor doesn’t really know on whose behalf he is rigging in the long term.
Following the rise of open-to-anyone primaries in the latter half of the last century, the American party system has been colonized by voters in a way that manifests the cleavages of American civilization. There is a progressive party shaped by the culture and norms of America’s great egalitarian causes, including the civil-rights movement and organized labor, and a conservative one defined by its defense of the great American institutions, including business and religion.
It is fashionable to attest that America’s two-party system is arbitrary in its division, that the complexities of American life cannot be sorted into two take-it-or-leave-it bundles. Obviously, there exist Americans whose beliefs straddle or transcend the stereotypical norms of our partisan divide — the pot-smoking Evangelical, the gay uber-capitalist, etc. But as thinkers such as Yuval Levin, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, and others have discussed at length, the depth of our contemporary Left–Right divide is rooted in a fundamental conflict over questions of liberty, law, and culture. Most of us instinctively identify with one argument or the other.
There is nothing to stop any American with some wonderfully esoteric philosophy from winning a major-party nomination.
Take a look at those celebrated countries boasting “more” parties than America. In practice, their buffet often consists of little more than a slew of secessionist movements, personality cults, and archaic legacy parties kept alive by inertia. To the degree that more philosophically grounded parties exist, politics often takes the form of battles to eliminate redundancy, as has been in view recently with the crumbling of Europe’s social democrats as voters migrate to farther-left options.
The American party system is far more elegant and efficient thanks to strong voter control. Today, most Republicans are conservative in a particular way because there exists a sizable faction of American voters who want this style of conservatism. Most Democrats are progressive in the way they are because there exists a similarly ample electorate demanding it. There are areas of the country whose tastes differ somewhat, yet it is the brilliance of the American party system that these people, pro-life Democrats, anti-gun Republicans, whatever, are permitted to hold influence — but, and here is the critical stipulation — in proportion to their base of support.
There is nothing to stop any American with some wonderfully esoteric philosophy from winning a major-party nomination. They simply have to pick a brand and mobilize enough voters to win a primary. Donald Trump, Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, Rand Paul, Bob Casey, John McCain, and other free spirits have proven it’s entirely possible to pull in new people and revise their parties’ identities, though at some point their creativity will hit the confines of the Left–Right sociocultural divide that voters seem determined to enforce.
It’s fine to believe that American politicians are not where Americans want them — to assume that Democrats crave more Marxism, or that Republicans want less traditionalism, or some wilder theory. But there has always been an exceedingly easy way to test this thesis, a test very few party systems on earth are willing to extend to political eccentrics and dissidents: Run, and see what the voters say.
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