by Jerry Cayford
It’s a book about how our political system fell into this downward spiral—a doom loop of toxic politics. It’s a story that requires thinking big—about the nature of political conflict, about broad changes in American society over many decades, and, most of all, about the failures of our political institutions. (2)
Where to begin fixing our dysfunctional society is about as contentious a question as there is. Lee Drutman’s 2020 book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America confronts it head-on. Chapter 1, “What the Framers Got Right and What They Got Wrong,” goes straight to the heart of the matter: what the Founding Fathers got wrong is political parties. They understood the threat of tyranny that parties (“factions”) posed, but they misunderstood the benefits and inevitability of parties. They structured our government to discourage parties, instead of to accommodate them. As Drutman explains, those structural weaknesses have finally caught up with us in today’s toxic partisanship.
Like the Founders, Drutman gets important things right and wrong. He says, “At its core, my argument can be distilled into two words: institutions matter” (4). Political parties are the institutions he defends and criticizes. What we need parties to provide are substantive choices, not coercive conformity or destabilizing toxicity. This focus on parties is one of the many, many things Drutman gets right in his well-written, informative, and important book. When he turns from diagnosis to solution, though, he gets one big thing wrong.
Compromise for the uncompromising
The book is in three sections: “Origins,” “The Contemporary Crisis,” and “The Solution.” Drutman’s quick tour through the history of American democracy in “Origins” argues that our culture’s various forms of distaste for parties—antipartisanship, bipartisanship, even “responsible partisanship” (52)—all work against a well-functioning democracy:
The Progressives failed in their vision of populist nonpartisanship for the same reason the Framers failed in their vision of elitist nonpartisanship. Politics without parties to organize and structure conflict yields only chaos. Chaos is unsustainable. That’s why parties always emerge to structure politics. (43)
Without the structure that parties provide, people “are incoherent and powerless, and easy to divide and conquer” (43). (Viable parties largely distinguish democracy from dictatorship, a point Drutman quotes (41) from E. E. Schattschneider, the eminent midcentury political scientist whose work inspired this book.) Drutman returns often to the necessity of parties: “parties are the key institution leading disparate citizens to common purpose”; “Parties are the most powerful engines of mass political participation ever invented. Parties set the alternatives and frame the debates. They organize political conflict to render it comprehensible” (41). These are tremendous benefits, but they hint, too, at a dangerous power.
The Framers designed “anti-majoritarian,” “compromise-oriented political institutions” not easily controlled by any party: “We have separation-of-powers government designed to make narrow majority rule difficult to impossible” (3). Mostly, parties haven’t ruled even their local chapters, let alone the country: “for most of our history the two parties have been capacious, incoherent, and overlapping. This overlap lent a certain stability to American national politics, because it worked with, rather than against, our compromise-oriented political institutions” (2). Eventually, though, mass culture, urbanization, population explosion, instant communications, and two hundred years of change brought coherent identity to the parties, but “a fully divided two-party system is decidedly unworkable in America, given our political institutions” (3). The hostility to parties the Framers fostered inclines us to think escaping partisanship is the solution. Drutman’s solution is more and better parties.
Tracing the root of all evils
We are all familiar with the toxicity of current American politics. In addressing “The Contemporary Crisis,” Drutman does not shy away from the enormity of our danger: the two-party doom loop, as he calls it, threatens us not just with paralyzed government but with societal collapse. Politics is how we live together, and parties are how we structure politics. Drutman lets us see our crisis through the lens of political parties.
So, what is the two-party doom loop? In a nutshell, we are stuck with two parties, and they are stuck in a loop of increasingly toxic partisanship: ever-higher stakes, ever-deeper antagonism, and ever-greater incentives to break norms, cheat, and undermine long-term social structures for short-term advantage. There is a straightforward solution. What sticks us with two parties is our poorly designed electoral rules. If the winner can win without a majority or a runoff (our “first-past-the-post” rules), then voters have a powerful incentive to vote only for one of the top two candidates and ignore any others. This logic gives those two parties an insurmountable advantage. Drutman quotes a succinct 1923 expression of this “same old difficulty” where the “same old single-shot ballot…presents…the same old dilemma between voting for a candidate [the voter] really wants and voting for the less objectionable of the two who have some chance of winning” (198, quoting C. G. Hoag). Our best choice is the lesser of two evils.
This electoral structure is the heart of our cultural and political crisis. Complaints about “the lesser of two evils” sound deceptively small because those complaints get the emphasis backwards: the point is not—not—the disappointment of the poor voters who don’t get their first choice. Boo hoo. The real point is that the single-shot ballot gives two parties a lock on all government power, leaving them jointly immune to the will of the voters and free to become the greater and lesser evils.
(I am forever grateful to Dr. Drutman for directing his readers (259) to an hilarious spoof by The Simpsons of exactly this feature of our electoral system. In “Citizen Kang,” which aired before the 1996 elections, space aliens intent on enslaving humanity abduct Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and replace them with alien duplicates. When voters discover the plot, the aliens scoff, “But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us!” Third party? “Go ahead; throw your vote away!” Humanity is enslaved.)
The “same old single-shot ballot” contrasts with the “single transferrable vote,” which transfers to the second choice if the voter’s first choice gets eliminated, transfers to the third if the second is out, etc. This is also called “ranked choice voting” or “instant runoff voting.” It empowers voters and opens the system up to third and fourth parties. Without it, the two parties can ignore the voters’ interests with impunity.
Their guaranteed control of the government accords the two parties a more subtle form of power as well. Just as voters won’t waste their votes on candidates who can’t win, they won’t waste their attention on issues not on the table: “What about the voters? Their choices are limited to what’s on offer. They can only choose among the issue bundles that the major parties put together. They learn what’s important based on what parties fight over. And they adjust their priorities and their positions accordingly” (128). Drutman returns to this essential point often: “What actively engaged citizens think about current events tends to flow from how partisan elites bundle policies and issues together and define what the parties stand for” (144-5). The two parties’ lock on power is created by faulty electoral rules, but then it is normalized by voters pragmatically taking that lock for granted.
The parties’ impunity shapes not only how voters think but also the course of the nation. In the Progressive era, “both parties were captured by powerful industrialists” (43). Fifty years later, the parties “forged a bipartisan consensus that the southern way of life was not up for debate in the halls of the US Congress” (50). Fifty more years later, “In the 1990s and 2000s, Americans got to choose between two parties that both supported the neoliberal consensus on global free trade. And (surprise) they voted for the party that supported the neoliberal consensus on global free trade” (230).
But why are we only now in a crisis of toxic partisanship? A key part of Drutman’s answer is a fundamental shift of focus the parties effected in our politics:
Conflict in all democratic societies basically boils down to two great questions: “Who gets what?” and “Who are we?” Or, put another way, all conflicts are at their core either about economics and the distribution of material resources or about national identity, culture, and social group hierarchy. (131)
After a history of ideologically diverse and incoherent parties, one of the changes that brought coherence and centralized control was money: “Campaigns grew more expensive in an era of television advertising” (73), which shifted power to donors (and to party leaders distributing donor money). Wealthy donors did not want our politics to focus on the distribution of wealth, so “the parties highlighted the culture war fights that divided their respective donor classes from each other” (75). Drutman has plenty to say about how identity conflicts become bitter, uncompromising, and toxic, but he never loses the key role of the parties: “Party leaders have no incentive to break [the doom loop of toxic partisanship]. The current conflict over national identity builds party unity” (156). After getting the vital benefits of parties right, Drutman also gets right their enormous cultural destructiveness when not constrained to be responsive to voters. “In a two-party system with winner-take-all elections, both parties can survive as corrupt” (197).
Of moderation from above and below
Just before the era of television, big money, and culture wars, politics was unusually placid and moderate. One of the interesting stories Drutman tells about our evolution from this boring consensus to extreme polarization concerns the “master theory” of political science: a “spatial” model of a left-right political spectrum (which we all know today) published by Anthony Downs in 1957. This schema generates the “median voter theorem” that says two parties in competition for votes will converge on the preferences of the median voter. Downs’s theory fit the midcentury experience and “most scholars of American politics accepted the one-dimensional model as their baseline” (226). The model seemed to justify a two-party system as intrinsically stable and moderate.
Downs himself pointed out that without ideological consensus among citizens the model could diverge to the extremes instead of converging to the center. Voter interests may be scattered around a median, but voter beliefs about their interests can polarize in two groupthink silos at the extremes (as we see today). In that moderate era, though, everyone chose to believe in convergence: “American pundits and consultants liked the simple logic that moving to the center wins elections, which gave them a simple talking point and a simple strategy. The median voter theorem thus became conventional wisdom among both scholars and pundits”; and “The polarizing hypothesis thus went ignored for sixty years” (227). Drutman is presenting the scholar’s “view from the hill” and the pundit’s “view from the trenches” as aligned here, but he has taught us enough about the political trenches to infer a more complex story about political actors than he is telling.
Strategists may like simplicity in talking points, but they want their strategies to actually win elections. Moderation for public relations, yes, but extremism as a strategy was being entertained quite early. Only seven years after Downs’s book, Barry Goldwater famously said, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Twenty years later, his faction was in full control of the Republican Party. Another decade later, Newt Gingrich was deliberately pushing extremism with tactics like blocking bills from getting votes unless the “majority of the majority” supported them (the “Hastert Rule,” named for his successor). As Drutman has told us, the leaders of both parties were pushing to the right on the economic axis, which is where their donors wanted them. The heart of our problem, remember, is that parties don’t follow voters because voters have no choice, as long as the two parties are moving rightward together. Meanwhile, leaders were pushing away from the center on the culture war axis.
Political actors were never sheep, captivated by a scholarly theory of convergence to the center of voter preferences. Rather, lip service to that idea justifies the two-party system, deflating any need for electoral reform, particularly ranked choice voting (RCV).
The scholar and the political activist
When Drutman turns to “The Solution,” his thought takes a particular path, a wrong turn that undermines his book’s practical value: he thinks like a scholar, but not like an activist. A scholar thinks about the ideal system we might create starting magically from a blank slate. An activist thinks about what we can achieve starting realistically from the slate we have. As FairVote puts it in a caveat to their report “Comparative Structural Reform,” “The scholars did not assess relative viability, which of course is a big practical consideration” (2). A scholar asks, what is the best electoral system, but an activist asks, how can we break the two-party doom loop? Scholarly thinking leads Drutman to multi-member districts, where he loses the thread of the argument most important to the activist. This loss of the practical thread undermines Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop as a guide to political action.
Drutman describes electoral design options, starting with ranked choice voting. RCV is the natural place to start because it directly repairs the root flaw, the “same old single-shot ballot.” But he moves on quickly to RCV variants and other successful systems, narrowing finally to two top choices: “Election experts tend to rank multi-winner ranked-choice voting and mixed-member proportional as the best electoral systems” (189). (“Multi-winner” here means larger districts electing multiple representatives. Mixed-member proportional is a more parliamentary method to achieve what RCV does.) Drutman concludes, “If there’s a debate worth having, it’s between these two alternatives” (191).
That last sentence was the only moment I felt like throwing Drutman’s book across the room: No! You have not earned that! Drutman has smuggled multi-member districts in on the coattails of RCV. For the remainder of the book Drutman contrasts our current disastrous situation only with this composite of RCV plus multi-member districts (thereafter called “multiparty democracy”), and he never considers the viability of multi-member districts. Ranked choice voting as a stand-alone electoral reform is buried, and with it the activist’s practical concern about which course of action can actually succeed.
For an activist, the debate worth having is exactly the one Drutman skips: whether or not to add multi-member districts to RCV. First, it bears repeating that RCV alone will break the two-party doom loop, secure multiparty democracy and responsive government, and may well save our society from violent collapse and tyranny. We’re all in agreement on that. Presumably, though, RCV plus five-member districts (the expert-preferred size) is even better. The activist’s question is how much value that incremental improvement adds at what cost. Specifically, how much risk of failing to get RCV is warranted by an effort to get multi-member districts as well?
Perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to multi-member districts (not the only one) is that “it renders gerrymandering largely useless” (221). But where this may look to a scholar like “killing two birds with one stone,” to an activist it evokes a different adage: “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The ominous flip side of how bad and intractable gerrymandering is is how hard the parties will fight to keep doing it. Combining five districts into one means telling five specific incumbents, “You are now going to have to compete with each other, and the weakest of you, to keep your seat, will have to defeat the strongest second-place candidate from each of the other four districts, plus any ethnic, single-issue, or other subculture candidates whose supporters are spread over five districts.” That is a very in-your-face challenge to throw at elected officials accustomed to control, including every official in two parties we have just finished describing as powerfully capable of shaping voter sentiments. We will need the majority of those officials to vote to eliminate their own districts. RCV alone, though, is a more gradual, less confrontational change.
The activist thinks about different strategic routes to the goal. If multi-member districts are indeed the best way to end gerrymandering, combining them with enlarging the House of Representatives to 700 members (which Drutman also advocates) would seem a more natural pairing, since it greatly softens the blow to incumbents while reshaping their districts. Reform by stages makes sense: RCV alone first, creating a more hospitable landscape for multi-member districts in a bigger House later.
Political strategy aside, multi-member districts have ambiguous effects. Drutman claims, “I agree with Madison: representatives should be close to their constituents. The more constituents that members represent, the easier it is to focus just on their most well-off constituents. The more distant members seem, the more constituents distrust them” (193). This is a good argument for a larger House, but it works exactly against multi-member districts! Multi-member districts necessarily have many more constituents than single-member ones. Will constituents trust their five representatives? Will the five spread their attention more evenly over five times as many constituents, or will all five lean toward the well-off? It’s hard to know, or to see Madison approving. But RCV alone virtually guarantees representatives that are closer, more trusted, and more responsive to constituents.
Lastly, consider the superficial concerns: complexity, unfamiliarity, mistrust. Already, the enemies of ranked choice voting claim that it is too complex and confusing for voters. This is a ridiculous claim about RCV, but it is not ridiculous about multi-member districts. And, advocate protestations notwithstanding, multi-member districts are a radical change (outlawed in America since 1842), one quite foreign to the identification voters feel with “my representative.” RCV alone, though, is not radical, not hard to understand, and engenders little anxiety (except among party bosses).
The point of these questions is not to doubt Drutman or other expert opinion about the value added by multi-member districts. It is only to draw attention to issues that will be weaponized by the opponents of change. An activist takes seriously the viability question a scholar brushes aside: can I win this political battle and accomplish this change? Combining RCV with other electoral reforms can attract allies drawn to those reforms, but the activist knows it can also discourage allies and provoke opposition.
Drutman does intend his book as a guide for activism, and chapter ten addresses the practical question of how change can happen. The most concrete part is about other countries that have adopted proportional representation (PR, equivalent to RCV with multi-member districts). Twelve European countries did so before, during, or shortly after World War I, and Drutman takes these precedents to show that change can happen. But this historical record provides an eye-rollingly weak argument, and Drutman half-heartedly acknowledges as much: “The early twentieth century was a topsy-turvy time in Europe. Countries were industrializing and expanding the vote, and the wild swings and uncertainties of majoritarian politics were producing chaos. Several countries were on the verge of civil war” (245). I say “half-hearted” because his description seriously understates the chaos. Drutman does not even mention WWI, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, newly-forming countries, monarchies falling or transitioning to “constitutional monarchy,” hyperinflation, wobbling colonial empires, and so on. The real message from history seems to work against him: countries radically change their electoral systems only under conditions of nearly complete societal collapse.
The only exception appears to be New Zealand, which adopted PR by referendum in 1993. PR is a less radical change for a parliamentary system like tiny New Zealand’s. Still, it happened there by a convoluted route featuring multiple spoiler elections, thwarted popular votes, high voter outrage, and a party leader accidentally promising a referendum by misreading his notes in a live televised debate. So, I suppose it could happen here.
The power of an idea whose time has come
If an opportunity to implement RCV for congressional elections comes, it may arrive with astonishing speed and with shocking disorder. We are in the middle right now of the most unpopular presidential election anyone can remember. Depending on how it turns out, voter anger at our electoral system may spike. The ranked choice advocacy community needs to know their goals, their message to supporters, and the compromises they are prepared to make.
I wrote about RCV six months ago on 3 Quarks Daily, and discovered that FairVote—the national organization leading the campaign to adopt RCV—has in recent years thrown its weight behind a bill linking multi-member districts with RCV. I learned about Drutman’s book in trying to find out why. Three weeks ago, the RCV advocacy community reintroduced that bill, the Fair Representation Act. This suggests they are indeed thinking that RCV’s time may be coming soon. But it also means they are doubling down on combining RCV with multi-member districts, as Drutman recommends, leaving the simpler Ranked Choice Voting Act to languish.
There is one supremely important flaw in our electoral system. In Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, Lee Drutman gives us a lively, thorough, and penetrating analysis of how that flaw shields the two parties from accountability to voters while incentivizing them to toxic partisanship. A great virtue of his book is its specificity in mapping the logic of this one flaw’s effects, rather than listing a variety of problems that amorphously undermine society. The loss of this specificity when Drutman turns to a composite solution—with barely even a cursory glance at its viability—is a loss even from the scholar’s perspective, and a great frustration from the activist’s.
Ranked choice voting will open our political system to more parties, and make them more responsive to voters. Combining RCV with multi-member districts is presumably even better, and this is the course the advocacy community has chosen. I would not begrudge anybody aiming for the stars. But I hope they are clear with supporters and with each other: it is RCV that will cure the dysfunction that ails America. Remember, when hard choices have to be made.