Two-Party, or Not Two-Party
Something extreme is coming to conservative politics — with or without the GOP.
In his farewell address, George Washington famously advised future generations against embracing political parties. Then again, Jackson used his sendoff to decry “money power” and corporate America’s capacity to overwhelm ordinary citizens’ liberties, and Eisenhower spent his warning the public about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Perhaps, then, sharing key reflections at the end of a president’s administration is not the most impactful tactic.
By the time Washington delivered and published his parting remarks, the toothpaste from which he most certainly would have benefitted had already left the tube. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans emerged from his own administration, personified most famously by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.
With the clarity of hindsight, it is hard to fathom a United States that would not develop political parties. The American experiment was built on a seismic fault line: federalism, or balancing power between one central and myriad state governments. Ratifying the Constitution (1788) was no small feat in part because this balance was so difficult to strike in a form that garnered approval from the necessary founding players. Questions about the federal structure that were not resolved before ratification did not disappear in the aftermath, and new questions on the power dynamic inexorably emerged over the next 230ish years.
Each in his own way, noted cultural critics Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr and David Wooderson put it best: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Washington was perhaps naïve to hope that we could move forward without organized political factions, but his lack of party affiliation and his concern with the entire apparatus are reminders that today’s Democrats and Republicans were not built into the founding of the nation. Instead, US history shows that major political parties are impelled into being, as gravity is impelled to cast apples to the ground. The names and faces change, but the federalist fault line remains a primary divider between two major parties.
In the 1850s, that fault line was tested — and the political response from the established party powers was inadequate. At the beginning of the decade, a Whig was president. By 1860, the Whigs were no more, the Democrats had split, and a new political coalition had gotten Abraham Lincoln elected president. Against the backdrop of Westward expansion, Democrats and Whigs failed to resolve the question of slavery, so a new power, the Republican Party, was impelled into being. Such was the magnitude of slavery as a political issue (to say nothing of its morality) that the party structure of the early 1850s was entirely remade within a matter of years.
In the twentieth century, the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement impelled the reinvention of both the Democratic and Republican coalitions. This was a shift in their reflective orbits around the question of federalism (and related issues, particularly race). When this realignment was completed, there remained one major party that was center-left and one center-right, as it had been before.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Since the late 1960s and 70s, with no party teardown equal in scope to those of the 1850s or mid-twentieth century, the two major electoral coalitions have remained reasonably similar. Maintaining their political strength by balancing the intrinsic impulses of the American system, Democrats have largely operated as the big federal government option and Republicans have largely operated as the states’ rights option.
Except that’s not true.
Meeting in the middle
Unique details aside, advanced Western democracies all navigate challenges around the size and role of government. No matter the number of political parties contained in each, two large bodies generally stand tallest — one center-left, one center-right. The relative strength or weakness of this two-party equilibrium is a historical indicator of a democracy’s health. This is because a representative government cannot function if a critical mass does not buy in, and, theoretically, this structure provides space for disagreement while bringing the widest possible range of the political spectrum into the fold.
In multi-party systems, this might take the form of a smaller party coordinating with one of the major parties to achieve a specific policy aim. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats secure buy-in and render third parties inert by absorbing their most popular policy positions.
Not all buy-in is equal. Broadly speaking, the degree of investment required of the left does not reach the degree required of the right. In an interview with The Atlantic, political scientist Daniel Ziblatt uses examples from the 19th and 20th centuries to explain why:
“The far-right end of the political spectrum — these were the potential saboteurs of democracy. And so the question is: How do you get these guys to buy in?… Certainly there were far-left elements, communists, who were trying to undermine the regime, but these groups on the far-right had the motive to undermine democracy and they also had the means to undermine democracy because they often had access to the state, to the military.”
Without a robust center-right apparatus, the far-right is free to gather strength. A healthy democracy is one that keeps a sufficient degree of both fringes invested in the system — two-party equilibrium — but it is generally the far-right that maintains proximity to greater tools of disruption.
Ziblatt cites France as an example of a country that was on the verge of crisis “from the 1840s through to Vichy” because “there was no Tory, moderate, center-right tradition that was well-developed.”
History rhymes. The center-right tradition that once gave ostensible purpose to the Republican Party has eroded. Taking residence in the GOP’s infrastructural husk is a far-right with direct access to central institutions. The United States, with no Tories of its own to call on, now stands where France once stood — until it fell into the abyss.
The right stuff
Long before Donald Trump became president, the Republican Party had confidently staked out ground in the big-federal-government camp. Republicans’ neoliberal faction, desirous of no forever wars, legislation with pay-fors, and letting states lead as laboratories of democracy, was forsaken in practice, if not in bombast.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using the appropriate levers of government, be they federal, state, or local, but the increasingly visible conflict between Democrats and Republicans has grown ever-more national, mirroring the evolution of the news media landscape. This has consequences, from calcifying division, to eschewing public discourse on state and local matters in favor of national political theater, to leaving the entire system woefully unpracticed in the art of working across levels and agencies at a time of desperate need (like during a pandemic).
Placing more attention on national governance prioritizes winning over public policy (i.e. make liberals cry) and fosters extremism (more on this in a moment). This is partly to do with soap opera-style coverage and segmented delivery of information, but it is also a byproduct of scale: National identity is more likely to feel abstract and neatly categorized when compared to real life, which is messy and complicated. Real life has a face.
To illustrate this distinction, here is an example from an event that took place in November 2020:
The aforementioned extremism may be unavoidable in moments of major party upheaval — hence the upheaval. Slavery is one of the two existential, unforgivable American sins (with the genocide and cultural destruction of native populations); bringing about its institutional end required the most extreme struggle in the nation’s history. The Great Depression was sufficiently extreme to earn an adjective, capital letters, and recognition as its own era. The realignment of the 60s and 70s responded to an extreme loss of systemic innocence: mutually assured destruction, civil rights, feminism, Vietnam, Watergate, and the siphoning of influence from the Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers.
Today, extremism is what’s extreme.
According to the combined results of 21 Gallup surveys conducted in 2019, the US self-identifies as a center-right country. Take this with a grain of salt, but in Gallup’s estimation, “absent partisanship, with Americans leaning center-right politically, the country would always elect a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican president.”
While its progressive flank and the passage of time drag the Overton Window leftward, the off-center Democratic establishment is doing its part to maintain the two-party equilibrium.
The GOP is not. The following paragraph opens a New York Times data study, which uses findings from the Manifesto Project to compare party platforms across nations:
“The Republican Party leans much farther right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and Canada, according to an analysis of their election manifestos. It is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), which some consider far-right populist parties. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is positioned closer to mainstream liberal parties.”
The Democratic Party is not without sin, but bothsidesing this dynamic is intellectually irresponsible. The Republican Party has positioned itself beyond the mainstream in its policies (like opposing gun control legislation, even though background checks, for instance, are overwhelmingly popular) and in its norms, most recently choosing an authoritarian-flavored response to the democratic election of an opposition presidential candidate. An epistemic crisis is spiraling out of control.
The consequence of these positions should be relegation to the proportional fringe. “The difference is that in Europe,” per the Times, “far-right populist parties are often an alternative to the mainstream. In the United States, the Republican Party is the mainstream.”
Whereas the Democratic Party has mollified its left wing enough to maintain a working coalition, the Republican Party has set up shop on its right wing without mollifying the center. Lost in the shuffle is an organized, large-scale, moderately conservative political entity which meaningfully advocates the forms of government (state and local) that are closest to affecting the lives and livelihoods of individual citizens.
In this center-right country, a majority of citizens does not identify with the Republican Party, nor does it identify with being conservative. A different but overlapping majority does not identify with the Democratic Party nor with being liberal. Self-identification is about brand. Removed from the burdens of a toxic one (the Democratic Party’s, currently the only viable alternative), many popular policy positions that lack a far-right GOP’s support might get a new day in the court of public opinion.
Is there a center-right that wants to secure some combination of public and private health care for all, pursue more humane immigration policies, and not support a coup all at the same time?
Two-party equilibrium is like real estate — location, location, location. Historically rare is the occasion when acreage near the center of the political spectrum is left unattended. With the right people, infrastructure, and message, another upheaval is due.
