Overcoming a two-party wall

Four days. Four days remain until we pack into school cafeterias, ward offices and at Duke, the mysterious Devil’s Den, to cast votes for the next president of America. College-age students have been told this is normally a prideful affair. This year though, no one denies that things have turned poisonous. Sure, there are some of the usual healthy elements of voter enthusiasm—bumper stickers and record CNN election coverage ratings—but underneath, things are sick and turbulent. Half of Americans believe that they have no good choice for president: that one major candidate is a lout and the other a liar, and that neither of them represents their country well. Scholars have flooded discourse with explanations for how we got here, but almost all have gotten caught up in diagnosing symptoms of the problem while failing to acknowledge one of its roots—that the choice must be between Clinton and Trump—that only two parties can seriously compete to win the presidency.

The two-party system is not strictly written into the Constitution, but electoral guidelines set out in the document have all but guaranteed its dominance. It has some benefits, to be sure: it is easy to understand, easy to cast votes in and does a good job of ensuring that large groups of people can organize to keep politicians accountable. But it is severely limiting.

Endorsing a two-party system is almost akin to saying that there are exactly two different kinds of people in the United States. It leaves no room for nuance or variance in opinion. Socialists, neoliberals and blue dogs are all shoved into the Democratic Party while libertarians, neoconservatives, alt-righters and business-righters are all shoehorned into the Republican party. If alt-righters turn out in great numbers in the Republican primary and elect Donald Trump as the party nominee, the other factions of the party are left homeless. They may loathe their candidate, but that changes nothing: there are effectively only two choices for president.

That is not the end of the two-party dilemma. When parties become polarized, as has happened right now, a two-party system creates diametric opposition. Reaching across the aisle becomes a betrayal of one’s own—there is only room to support tribe A or B. As polarization amplifies, people grow agitated and democracy denatures.

The alternative to a two-party system is, of course, a multiparty system—one with more than two parties. In a multiparty system, there is no need for a broad spectrum of opinions to be squashed into a binary. There is room for a Sanders Left and a Clinton Left; a Cruz right, a Rubio Right and a whole new Ron Paul dimension. There is no strange election dance where candidates preach hard ideology in primary elections and then quickly revert to the median in a general election. Politicians belong to parties representative of them and voters can vote for platforms that reflect their true distribution of beliefs.

Of course it isn’t really that simple. A US multiparty system would require the Constitution to be rewritten: a parliament would replace our congress, a prime minister our president and party ministers our cabinet. In a multiparty system, we might see the rise of fringe extremist parties. We might not be able to form a government. We might still find ourselves in unfortunate political situations.

But at a time when swaths of Americans feel that they have no home in the political system, perhaps we need to think outside the box to solve our problems.