In a previous post, I explained how political parties started in America and why we are stuck in a two-party system. To continue the conversation, I will discuss the political climate of today and what this may mean for the future of political parties.
As the United States grew older, it exposed itself to more difficult political issues to grapple with. Strength of government and economy came first as the most fundamental of political matters, and these are the issues that still are held to be the most important areas of policy by presidents, politicians, and pundits today. Looking at how far we have come since then, perhaps Washington was right to warn us about political parties, no matter what they were in the beginning. From just the second round of political parties in the early to mid-1800s, during which Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs reigned, the menu of political controversies expanded exponentially to include: slavery, western expansionism, nationalism, anti-elitism, working class struggles, immigration. Today, we juggle everything from political correctness to gendered bathrooms.
Now, there are some things that must be understood when it comes to the massive amount of political issues we encounter today. Yes, as certain topics became more and more pressing in America, maybe political parties had no other choice but to come in at some point and make their stances clear. And difficult enough as it is to have only two political parties represent positions on a myriad of multi-faceted issues, what really has changed the political air of today is politicization.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, politicization means "the action of causing an activity or event to become political in character." Not only has politics managed to place laws governing so many areas of life people in the 18th century never would have imagined would be political, but politics has also become so pervasive that literally anything can be made into a political statement. These two ideas go hand-in-hand, but does the prior necessitate the latter? I'm not so sure, especially considering the technology of today. Television and movies have allowed us to watch programs and films from across the world, but those industries have always had some push to be monitored – take for example the 1930s Hays Code or film ratings by the Motion Picture Association of America. What really makes politics so accessible and applicable today are the Internet and our devices.
With the expansive and lightning-fast nature of the Internet, anything and everything is available. People can keep up with political movements happening across the globe, read translated texts, chat with people anywhere about policies, voice their opinions with little restraint. We can educate ourselves on any subject from countless angles, and that's one of the reasons I like that we can learn about politics through the web. I admit I learned most of what I knew in my first couple years of political awareness via the Internet, and although I had to learn to take everything I read with a grain of salt and some fact-checking, I understand why the Internet has become such a political place.
Our technological devices offer the amplification of a different side of politics: history and transparency. People can record or take pictures of anything on their smartphones; more and more police are using body cams. Emails, video and audio recordings, and other cellphone data can all be used against someone. Combined with the Internet, it is easy enough to find out just about anything and hold individuals accountable for what they do and say.
And people have. For instance, Weekend 2 of Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the wildly popular three-day affair in Indio, California, is currently happening, bringing about another wave of criticism to Coachella's very distant owner, Philip Anschutz. I say "distant" because Coachella is held by Goldenvoice, which was acquired by Anschutz Entertainment Group, whose owner probably spends very little time concerning himself with what a bunch of twenty-somethings in the desert do this time of year. But thanks to tax filings and local press releases, people seem to know exactly where this man stands in politics and have festival goers questioning whether or not to fund someone they do not agree with.
Being able to check the receipts is not necessarily a bad thing, but where should politicization end? I believe quite heavily that politics affects everything and everything affects politics, but that does not mean I feel the need to catalogue every single thing in my life and look into any way it or its components could be related to a political matter. I understand there is a limit that I have to be politically aware but also function in everyday life. This piece from Politico addresses this very issue and gives a great overview of how impossible it is to avoid politics now: your friends on social media, favorite brands, local stores, and beloved celebrities all have something to share. Is that too far?
I would occasionally like some relief from this cold reality – a good movie, a simple trip to the grocery store. After all, if even the parts of American life that unite us are politicized – even baseball and brunch – how do we hold the country together? What do we share when our most innocent pastimes are reduced to partisanship?
The politicization of everything is, I feel, irreversible at this point, but this could be the answer to the two-party quandary. Now that everything can easily be construed as political, whether it be where you eat or where you listen to music, can two parties really hold up all these countless issues? As we explore the depth of issues in the 21st century, for instance, not just leaving feminism at voting rights but discussing representation, dress codes, objectification in advertising, media, and entertainment, abortion and inequalities in healthcare, gender-motivated violence, equal pay, and parental leave, can American citizens really be sustained and satisfied by just two parties? Doubtful. Maybe what we need to break the two-party system is not a forceful third party platform but the simple fact that there are too many possible platforms to have.
A general realization of the cons of a two-party system will obviously not be enough to actually bring about multiple, equally-strong parties. The two-party system has been supported by Americans with an amazing consistency, and I can't say that without some serious cultural and structural changes (such as to voting procedures, which I went into in my previous post), we will suddenly have at least three competing parties. However, the 2016 election proved to me that there is something that does need serious changing. It left a bitter taste in almost everyone's mouth, regardless of who they voted for. Seeing the trajectory we are on now, I predict seeing a greater third-party presence in the elections, local and national, in the near future.
The popular thing to say when it comes to American political parties is that none other than our esteemed first President, George Washington, was against them. In light of the mounting tensions between the parties, I thought this would be a great time to introduce our political party system on this blog.
Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of American politics knows that they come down to two main parties: Democrats and Republics. The existence of such groups was one of the most confusing aspects of my introduction to politics. I had come into politics on the principle of issues only to learn that political parties divided the people in two. Entire families restrict themselves to a single party! Presidents run on party platforms! People check Democratic or Republican candidates all down the ballot without even researching them! It's hard to not wonder how a two-party system, or a party system at all, is an adequate way of representing the multitude of perspectives held by the American people. George Washington said it well in his farewell address:
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations... are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction... to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
Political parties distract us from individual issues and the diverse opinions of the people by packaging the interests of powerful minorities and forcing the people between them, otherwise known as party platforms. This attitude, the simple game of win or lose between the two parties or the "projects of faction," is what makes everyday citizens despise politics. It's what makes politics not about the people.
Think for a moment how many general issues are involved in the running of a country. Power of federal versus state government, taxes, education, social justice and equality, environmental sustainability, foreign policy, to name a few. And just in one of those issues are a multitude of sub-issues. Take education for example. How much should government, especially local government, have a say in how schools teach their students? What kind of programs (after-school, art, physical education, etc.) should or should not be funded? What about foreign languages in schools? How can postsecondary education be made more affordable? Bring in all the countless other issues in politics. There is simply no feasible Venn diagram in which half the country can have the exact same stance on all of these issues.
But parties did not start with the extensive platforms of today; that is what parties have become, and it's an effect we feed into in every election. Political parties, which had their birth in this country during our very first election in 1796, to the disappointment of Washington I'm sure, were very different from the parties we know today. They did not have the range of controversial topics we have now such as abortion and other healthcare matters, LGBT rights, police brutality. The Federalists were staunch supporters of the Constitution, a strong federal government, and pro-business and pro-banking, and the Democratic-Republicans were more diverse in ethnicity and background and against these grand commercial ideas. But when it came down to it, who really defined these interest groups? Alexander Hamilton, whose economic policies defined the Federalists, and Thomas Jefferson, who rejected these policies. It really was a smaller set of interests for smaller groups of people. [For a more detailed timeline of our party system, see here]
The approach to party politics was also much more delicate then because the country had just come out of a war. It only makes sense that something as divisive as political parties would not be recommended, but as Jefferson astutely noted,
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers form them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves.
There is definitely some bias written into point 2, but the message is clear. Essentially, the question comes down to how powerful we want our government to be. There is a key lens to this problem that is missing here. It isn't just a matter of where to place the power but how to protect the power. In democratic societies, we want to protect everyone's rights, ensuring our life, liberty, and property/pursuit of happiness. Everyone gets freedom of speech. Everyone can own private property. Everyone can vote. But at the same time, someone needs to be able to enforce these rights, to come in and say, "Hey, you've infringed on this other person's rights, so back up." That necessitates government oversight.
So if we acknowledge that this pro or against strong government idea will always be a part of our political discourse, and we somehow get our parties to not define themselves by that, is there a way we can have a diverse party system based on just where voters stand on individual issues?
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Political scientists put this situation under Duverger's law, which says "the simple-majority single-ballot system favors the two-party system." He follows this by saying "the simple-majority system with second ballot and proportional representation favors multi-partyism." As this paper in The American Political Science Review suggests, in single-winner plurality countries, the end game is simply getting a majority of the votes. The most efficient way to do this is to align with one of two main parties at the cost of more complex platforms.
Think of it this way. In a perfect world in which everyone votes, the majority would be 50+% of the people. If voters feel constrained to only two parties, then it is easier to achieve this majority. 100%/2 = 50%, so you are starting closer to the goal. The more equally strong parties there are, the harder it is for any of them to a) overtake competing parties and b) hold a simple majority at all. 100/3 = ~33%, 100/4 = 25%, and so on. Here's some data that supports this idea:
Solutions to this problem of a two-party lock have of course been offered: runoff voting, proportional voting, range voting. The questions that necessarily follow are: is it worth it in America, and is it feasible? I hope to discuss this further in a future post.
