Our Two-Party System Isn’t Going Anywhere

E lon Musk’s “America Party,” which he lauded in early July, didn’t last very long. They never do. As the Wall Street Journal reported six weeks later:

Musk has told allies that he wants to focus his attention on his companies and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans by starting a third party that could siphon off GOP voters. Musk’s posture marks a shift from early last month, when he said he would form what he called the America Party to represent U.S. voters who are unhappy with the two major political parties.

As he has considered launching a party, the Tesla chief executive has been focused in part on maintaining ties with Vice President JD Vance, who is widely seen as a potential heir to the MAGA political movement. Musk has stayed in touch with Vance in recent weeks, and he has acknowledged to associates that if he goes ahead with forming a political party, he would damage his relationship with the vice president, the people said.

Of course, it was always obvious that it could be very bad for Musk’s sprawling business empire to launch a high-profile assault on the party that currently controls the executive branch and both houses of Congress, especially given the vindictive nature of President Trump and his lack of qualms about translating that sentiment into the leverage of federal regulatory power. It would require remarkable commitment for Musk to stay that course, and he seems to have thought better of it.

Complaining about America’s two-party system is a hardy perennial: It’s a “duopoly” that polarizes our politics by driving us to the extremes — or, it’s a “uniparty” that freezes out real policy change by pulling us toward a center that limits the scope of debate. “Centrist” and good-government reformers prefer the prior charge; ideologues on the left and right prefer the latter. Libertarians and populists often pursue both charges simultaneously. The libertarians object to finding their preferred small-government and individual-liberty policies in one party and their preferred law-enforcement, social, and foreign policies in the other. The populists want not only to have big, socially conservative government and strong law enforcement, but also to bust up the elite internationalist consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign affairs.

But two parties has been the norm from the very outset of American politics, even in spite of how much George Washington and James Madison warned against factions. Madison himself was as responsible as anybody for creating the two-party system, given his role in the early 1790s in bringing organization and coherence to the faction forming around Madison’s friend and mentor Thomas Jefferson, and the Jefferson-Madison objections to Alexander Hamilton’s financial and economic policies. Madison consoled himself that the sprawling, national, often-incoherent coalition that ultimately became the Democratic Party was more an alliance of factions than a faction in itself, but ever since then, the spirit of factionalism has nevertheless been with the Democrats and their enemies (the Federalists, then the Whigs, then the Republicans).

A major reason is simply the structure of our federal and state constitutions. Since the Founding and even in colonial times, nearly all general elections in America have been decided on a first-past-the-post system in which the candidate with the most votes wins (in presidential politics, this happens at the statewide level). The very fact of electing an executive separate from the legislature means that there can only be one winner in contests for executive power — unlike in parliamentary systems, where the prime minister may be the head of a coalition of different parties who can withdraw and bring down the government at a moment’s notice.

In practice, everything from legislative coalitions to fundraising to voter mobilization to judicial appointments works better if factions that have enough in common work together under the umbrella of a single party, however fractious. Even without the American system, Edmund Burke saw the development of contending factions in England (originally, the Tories and Whigs of the late 17th century) and the advantages of joining one side or the other. Burke argued that men unattached to a party ended up being easily bought by the Crown, and that it was the honorable path to associate in parties (even at the price of some compromises) in order to bring one’s ideas into political practice.

Third parties in American history have never had more than momentary success, occasionally winning a governor’s mansion or a few legislative seats or winning enough votes in a presidential election to throw the outcome from one of the two parties to the other. And those successes are almost always built around a single, charismatic individual. It’s not a coincidence that the only two true third-party campaigns to break 20 percent of the national popular vote (Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Millard Fillmore in 1856) were both running candidates who had previously been president representing one of the two major parties.

Nor has a third party ever supplanted a major party from outside the system. The death of the Federalist Party led to a brief holiday from the two-party system (the “Era of Good Feelings” between the 1816 and 1824 elections), but tensions within the remaining Democratic-Republican Party swiftly devolved into two factions that became the second party system by the mid-1830s. When the Republican Party pushed its way into becoming the second party between 1854 and 1858, it did so mainly because the Whig Party had been exposed in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act fight to be inadequate as a vehicle to stop the Democratic agenda. Once the Whigs could no longer serve the role of second party, the auditions were on to replace it in that role, and the Republicans and that era’s American Party (the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, who ran Fillmore in 1856) both came quickly to understand that they were in a contest that would have to end with one of them absorbing the other. Since then, third parties such as the Populist Party of the 1890s and the Reform Party of the 1990s (in whose primaries Donald Trump ran briefly in 2000) have ended up co-opted by one or both of the two major parties bending to offer concessions to their platforms.

If that system has many faults, the grooves it has cut in our political habits and mores are too deep to be eradicated even if we changed the system. What is likelier to happen in the future is that parties end up as the targets of what amount to hostile takeovers from the outside factions they absorb. William Jennings Bryan did that to the Democrats, remaking them in the image of the Populists; Trump has been doing the same to Republicans.

In the long run, the damage this does to the coherence of the Republican Party — the first truly ideological major party in American history — is likely to be outweighed by the necessity to continue making strange bedfellows. While Musk has moved in Trump’s direction on issues such as transgenderism and illegal immigration, his natural instincts remain more small-government and socially liberal than Trump’s — and yet Musk is already bonding with Vance, whose politics are even more big-government than Trump’s.

This is yet further proof that none of the third-party dreams — a socially liberal and fiscally conservative party; an anti-establishment party that’s socially conservative but against trade, immigration, alliances, and engagement in the world; or a party that’s libertarian and against the cops and the army — is going to work. All of those tendencies will have to keep on facing the challenge of operating inside one or the other of the two major parties, and doing so with enough partial allies of convenience to build majorities.