Divided government and wild dysfunction has completely decimated the traditional idea of how the United States government is supposed to pass and enact legislation. Look for nothing of value to get through Congress or, for that matter, from the President’s desk.
Much of the Democratic campaign for the 2022 midterm elections centers around efforts by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. If you love what the Democratic Party stands for, it’s an outrage. Not so much if you don’t.
At least at first, America’s founders famously disliked political parties, and so failed to provide for them in the Constitution. Like them or not, however, the two-party system has prevailed for 95% of our history. Given that third parties face high barriers to obtain ballot access, are shut out of televised debates and routinely denied media exposure, the duopoly is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future.
A corollary to Toqueville’s observation that a well-informed electorate is essential to democracy is that fuzziness and confusion at the ballot box means that voters cannot make an informed decision, will feel cheated and fooled, and will eventually lose faith in electoral politics altogether.
Alas, our two-party system is being corrupted by forces and reforms that trick and manipulate voters.
I’m not talking merely about the longstanding phenomenon of the conservative DINO Democrat or the liberal RINO Republican, though gray-zone wishy-washies do muddy the waters. What used to be a relatively simple choice between the party of liberalism and the common man versus the party of tradition and business is under heavy fire.
This year, for example, Democrats spent $53 million on ads across nine states on “six gubernatorial races, two Senate contests, and five House campaigns,” according to The Washington Post, in order to help far-right MAGA candidates and smear their moderate Republican opponents in GOP primaries—in the words of The New York Post editorial board, “putting their money where Donald Trump’s mouth is” on a bet that Trump-aligned Republicans will be easier to beat this November. Democratic interference worked in four of those.
Both parties have done this sort of thing before, but on nothing close to this scale.
Setting aside the hypocrisy of Democrats characterizing extremist Republicans as an existential threat to democracy and financing those nutty right-wingers so they advance closer to elected office, funneling funds across party lines is a fraud against voters of both parties. Democratic donors don’t send checks to the Democratic Party in order to support the Republican Party. If Dems asked their supporters for permission to divert their donations to their supposed political enemies, that would be something else—but there’s no evidence of that.
At the same time, the money sidelined for this mother of all Democratic dirty tricks covert operation might otherwise have been directed to cash-poor Democratic candidates who could have used it to prevail in the general election. The whole party is thus arguably a fraud.
If Republican primaries aren’t a forum for debate and discussion between and for Republicans only, what’s the meaning of a Republican nominee? Perhaps in an open- primary state they should be listed on general-election ballots as “Mostly Republican” or “Somewhat Republican,” since it’s theoretically possible for more than half the voters in a primary race to be Democrats.
More fundamentally to democracy, people who vote in these races are unaware of some major facts. If Democratic voters knew that their own party helped the “extreme right” Republican nominee, they might withhold their vote from both candidates in order to protest this practice. On the other hand, Republican voters might not reflexively support “their” party’s nominee if they thought they were being duped. Or they might be more likely to do so in order to teach Democrats a lesson. D vs. R isn’t the same as D vs. R*, though they’re labeled the same.
Federal campaign finance laws ought to be clarified in order to prohibit the redirection of monies raised to support the candidates of one party to those of another party.
Washington, California, Nebraska and Alaska have abolished party primaries in favor of blended primaries in which the top-two vote-getters compete in the general election. The law of unintended consequences is epitomized by this misbegotten attempt to reduce polarized outcomes, which has not worked. California’s top-two system was supposed to increase voter participation; instead Republican voters often stay home in the many districts where the general election is a face-off between a progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. Democrats often recruit insincere Republicans to dilute the Republican field enough to push their name into the top two. “Now you have someone in every little f—ing Assembly race trying to prop up the Republican,” Paul Mitchell with Political Data Inc. told CalMatters. “It’s become a part of the process as much as lawn signs. It’s part of the California campaign war chest.”
In the recent Alaska contest for Congress lost by former governor Sarah Palin, 60% of voters wanted a Republican. Yet a Democrat won.
Blended primaries have disenfranchised California Republicans and made it impossible for the average voter to understand who is paying for whom and why. Furtive motivations behind candidacies are anathema to a vibrant democracy that are supposed to be battles of ideas.
Whatever their flaws, political parties provide concise branding for voters who prefer to spend their time doing something other than studying the 50-page ranked-voting guide sent to New York City voters in the last mayoral race. As a political cartoonist and writer, I am as well informed as any citizen can reasonably be expected to be, yet it isn’t realistic to expect me or anyone else to know about the personal and political history of every minor candidate. Like many voters, I’ve never heard of most of the hopefuls for city council or judges so I vote straight party line on the (hopefully not too incorrect) assumption that party affiliation relates to ideological bent. Nonpartisan primary systems require an excessive level of engagement and should be abolished.
Similarly, open primaries in which people registered to one party may vote in the rival party’s primaries undermine the most appealing aspect of a two-party system, the ability of liberals to choose a liberal standardbearer without conservative influence and vice versa. Half the states have full, or partial open presidential primaries in which independent nonaffiliated voters may participate in a partisan primary.
Especially in races where one party’s nominee runs unopposed, as did Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012, it is tempting for that party’s partisans to vote in the rival party’s open primaries for the express purpose of causing mischief. 7% of votes cast in Georgia’s recent “Republican” primaries were Democrats. Brian Kemp trounced David Perdue, the weaker candidate for whom the crossover Democrats most likely voted. But it isn’t hard to find other examples where 7% would change the outcome.
I would have found it fun and hilarious, if I lived in Georgia, to vote in the Republican primary to mess with the results. As a leftist who believes systems ought to work fairly and intelligently, my right to a good time shouldn’t trump democracy.
I would prefer a parliamentary system. Nations with set or de facto two-party systems like the United States (56% in 2016), the United Kingdom (62%), Canada (62%) and Japan (53%) have significantly lower voter participation rates than those with multi-party democracies like Turkey (89%), Sweden (82%) and Israel (78%). The cause is self-evident. Voters are more motivated to turn up at the polls when their preferred party might win a seat at the table; a minor party may join a coalition government under a parliamentary system.
But let’s stick to reality. Until we free ourselves of the Democratic-Republican stranglehold, we’re stuck with the two-party system. And that system ought to be as easy to navigate as a supermarket shelf. Whether it’s a can of food or a political candidate, what is on the label of a product ought to be contained inside.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
As you know if you are one of my regular readers, I’m skeptical of hysterical claims that Donald Trump and his supporters represent a uniquely existential threat to democracy and the American way of life. Right-wing populist demagogues are a recurring feature of American history; there is nothing new here. Many “mainstream” politicians have promoted and promulgated policies that stepped over the line into fascism: the Red Scares of the Palmer raids and McCarthyism, concentration camps for Japanese Americans, the John Birch society, COINTELPRO, mass surveillance by the NSA, George W. Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq and assassination drones come to mind.
Trump had four full years in office, one of which was marked by a bona fide national emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic, that he might have exploited to impose martial law, yet the republic still stands.
Trump notwithstanding, it is true that democracy, even the watered-down worn-out version of our ancient republic, is fragile. Those wary of authoritarianism can never be too vigilant. So I’m always interested in what people perceive as a threat to the current system – and what they fail to see.
New York Times writer David Leonhardt is an intelligent mainstream subscriber to Trump Derangement Syndrome. The former president, he argues, represents a double-barreled attack on American democracy. First, Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Joe Biden spreads the virus of delegitimization. If nothing else, elections are supposed to settle the question of which candidate is most popular. If they don’t, what’s the point of holding them?
The second threat, Leonhardt says, is that “the power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.” The far-right Supreme Court, gerrymandering, the Senate filibuster, voter suppression and the Electoral College result in laws and rulings to the right of what most voters want.
The sore loser concern seems overblown. Disputed elections followed by large segments of the population who refused to accept the results have occurred repeatedly. 42% of Republicans thought Obama was born in Kenya, meaning that he was unqualified to run for president. 85% of Democrats said they believed Bush cheated in the 2000 election. Conservatives thought JFK cheated Nixon out of a win in 1960 and strongly disapproved of FDR’s decision to break tradition and run for a third term in 1940. Rutherford B. Hayes became president in 1876 but there’s no doubt that his ascent to the White House was the result of the most scurrilous skullduggery imaginable. Trump’s bitching is hardly unprecedented.
The gap between the right-wing politics of Congress and the Supreme Court and a relatively left electorate is mitigated by the decision of most liberals to live where their values are codified by legislation; New Yorkers, after all, still have abortion rights. Though blue staters may feel anger and sympathy for women who can’t get the procedure in the Deep South, those emotions are academic rather than visceral. Pitchfork-wielding liberals won’t be a thing any time soon.
My apologies for burying the lede, but the we-are-in-unusual-peril argument that leaps out at me is that “mainstream” corporatist—read, non-populist, country-club—Republicans are in bed with Trump… and that that makes all the difference. Leonhardt quotes Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.”
“When mainstream parties tolerate these guys, make excuses for them, protect them, that’s when democracy gets in trouble,” Levitsky says. “There have always been Marjorie Taylor Greenes. What I pay closer attention to is the behavior of the Kevin McCarthys.” Republican House Leader McCarthy, he points out, has backed up Greene despite her violent rhetoric.
Leonhardt correctly points out that something similar happened during the 1930s in Germany and other European countries. Hitler came to power with the support of traditional conservative parties whose leaders thought they could control the “Austrian corporal.” These louche establishmentarians “typically do not initiate attacks on democratic rules or institutions but who also do not attempt to stop these attacks. Through their complicity, these semi-loyal actors can cause a party, and a country, to slide toward authoritarianism.”
For decades Democrats have moaned: why don’t “respectable” Republicans speak out against the extremist Birchers/Klansmen/neoconservatives/Proud Boys/Trumpies/QAnoners in their midst?
The answer is that right-wing extremism is not a fringe group.
It is the Republican base.
Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, supporting violent policing are all baseline beliefs of the “mainstream” GOP. Far-right groups like those who gathered for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville provide the muscle, intellectual grounding and excitement for a Republican Party that without them would be doomed to permanent minority status. “Acceptable” Republicans like McCarthy and Mitch McConnell aren’t so much afraid of being voted out or physically assaulted if they were to criticize Trump as they are afraid of losing a vital part of their party constituency.
The few Republicans who criticize Trump and by extension the right-wing populist wing of the party commit personal political suicide and risk destroying their basic coalition. Liz Cheney aside, it’s not going to happen. Anyway, Cheney is an outlier who recognizes that her future is to get hired by MSNBC as a token fake Republican.
Returning to the rise of Nazism, the only real threat to Hitler and his goons in the 1930s was Germany’s left-wing parties, the communists and the socialists. Left-wing parties maintained paramilitary organizations that took on the Nazi brownshirts in the streets. With over 30% of the vote between them—1.5 million votes more than the Nazis—German leftists were numerous and militant enough to hold the Nazis at bay at the ballot box as well as in the streets.
Tragically and stupidly, however, the less militant socialists refused to join an alliance of convenience with the communists. Writing from exile, communist Leon Trotsky asked German socialists: “The policies of our parties are irreconcilably opposed; but if the fascists come tonight to wreck your organization’s hall, we will come running, arms in hand, to help you. Will you promise us that if our organization is threatened you will rush to our aid?” As the SPD dithered, the Nazis seized power with the complicity of traditional conservative parties. When socialists and communists finally came together, it was as inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
There is no point clinging to the foolish Democratic hope that corporate Republicans will cut Trumpies loose. The lesson of the 1930s is that the only force that can defeat an energetic and well-organized far right (and its Republican Party allies) is an energetic and well-organized far left.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Democrats are currently engaged in a very risky strategy: they are financing right wing pro Trump Republicans in Republican primaries and runoff elections based on the assumption that they will be easier to defeat in the fall. While they are at it, perhaps they should use similar tactics on abortion…
Liberal-leaning media outlets love Republican turncoats like Liz Cheney. They will lionize them to the end while ignoring lifelong loyal liberal Democrats.
Democrats rightly criticize Republicans for efforts to suppress the Democratic vote. But both parties suppress third parties like the Greens and Libertarians. If you doubt that, look for the third parties next time you cast a ballot. Any country with just two parties can’t reasonably call itself a democracy.
Democrats complain, correctly, that Republicans are trying to subvert democracy with voter suppression and other tactics. But what democracy are they trying to subvert? Both parties are far more similar than anyone would like to admit, meaning that there isn’t really a true choice at the ballot box in the first place.
Humanity seems absolutely determined not to do anything about the climate change crisis or the environment. But think about the bright side: rising oceans will resolve all sorts of issues that we actually pay attention to.
If a two-party democratic system is to be viable, it has to have a basic shared set of facts, values and issues about which people may differ, and should differ, about solutions. At this point in time, however, the United States doesn’t qualify because the American people are obsessed about totally different things depending on their political orientation.
