Carte Blanche: The Two-Party System Must Be Destroyed
Brooks Kraft
In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington warned Americans:
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism… The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
So, our first President warned us that a system in which two parties alternate in power would intensify division within the country to a point where we’d cross into an authoritarian state. Sound familiar?
He continued by detailing how partisanship leads to tyranny:
“It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”
George Washington couldn’t have described modern-day America any better. Democrats and Republicans have propelled the political system into a zero-sum game that primarily focuses on demonizing the other side. Voters have been duped into joining partisan tribes and fear their fellow Americans, all the while losing the ability to think critically. Emotions are being prayed on by politicians – distracting people from the fact that “foreign influence” (Washington’s word for special interests) has seized control on Capitol Hill at the expense of the will of the individual. Additionally, both parties have misled voters to believe that their elections are being stolen from them, provoking a Capitol insurrection when Donald Trump lost, and a vindicating $32 million investigation when he won. The country is in a chaotic downward spiral, and the two-party system is the cause.
Unless the duopoly is destroyed, Americans are destined for irreparable loss of the rights that our Founders gave us. As Abraham Lincoln best put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Our government currently doesn’t belong to the people, it belongs to a few who control the major parties and their cronies, and it is in serious jeopardy. In order to return it to the people, our country needs to adopt a multi-party system, and it needs a party that will scale down our over-inflated Federal government.
The State of Polarization
You can best find microcosms of our broken society these days on social media. A woman recently posted on an online local forum that she was looking to join Braver Angels, a national network of local chapters that host political discussions intended to foster civil bipartisan debate. She considered herself to be liberal and needed a conservative to join with her, per the organization’s requirements. This innocent post elicited a plethora of aggressive responses that condemned conservatives as racists, accused the poster of not being a “real liberal”, and told her to go to the landlord forums because that’s where she’d find the greedy capitalist Republicans. The poster mentioned that because few people in her area, “publicly admit to being Republican or conservative… I’ve only received private messages from such people, due to each of them feeling unsafe.”
In today’s hyper-partisan environment, politicians and media present every issue as a black and white emotional choice, not something to have a reasonable conversation over. If you support the police, then you’re a racist. If you want to see an end to the war on drugs, then you want kids to do heroin. If you question the need for multi-trillion-dollar “stimulus” bills every other month, then you must hate poor people. A woman in my DC neighborhood was recently overheard saying, “I guess I’m vaccinated so I don’t have to wear a mask outside but… I really don’t want people to think I’m a Republican.” In this same neighborhood, I put up Libertarian campaign signs last summer and every single one of them was slapped with a “Selfish-tarian Party” sticker. These are the standards our politicians have set for us. Compromise is a dirty word on Capitol Hill these days, while revenge and recklessness more appropriately describe modern political strategy.
This culture of intolerance was created by the duopoly, and it’s an existential threat to America. Hyper-partisanship breeds mistrust for those who hold different views, and it opens the door for either side to accept authoritarianism as a necessary tool to “beat” the other side. The duopoly now requires tribal allegiance and adherence to national identity. When people are scared to admit their political leanings out of fear of retribution, history has taught us that the next step is often tyranny or civil war.
Don’t Blame the Media, Blame the Politicians
Media has been an amplifier for toxic partisanship, but that it’s not the cause, and it certainly is the wrong target if you’re trying to ease tensions. Political division is profitable. Anger and discord and emotion drive the clicks; tax and trade policy debates don’t. When Donald Trump got elected as a spiteful egomaniac, it was Democrat politicians who responded to Trump’s nativist rhetoric with intolerance of their own. The media just relayed their sentiment to consumers. As one wise and politically homeless participant in the aforementioned online forum explained, “One never gives a narcissist that much attention… they simply eat it up so that alone turned me off to Democrats.”
There is nothing wrong with the media operating an efficient business model by capitalizing on hyper-partisanship. Print journalism faced an existential threat from the rise of the internet, and partisan journalism turned out to be the best way to save institutions like The Washington Post. They are also exercising their First Amendment rights, and restricting that is a very dangerous path which the authority-curious like Trump and AOC have flirted with. If politicians succeed in restricting free speech and press under the guise of resolving toxic partisanship, they will open the door to an authoritarian government and the death of democracy. We must avoid this, and instead look at the structural changes in legislative bodies that got us to this point.
In a 2019 Washington Post op-ed announcing his resignation from the Republican party, former Congressman Justin Amash asserted:
“True to Washington’s fears, Americans have allowed government officials, under assertions of expediency and party unity, to ignore the most basic tenets of our constitutional order: separation of powers, federalism and the rule of law. The result has been the consolidation of political power and the near disintegration of representative democracy.”
Amash took the bold step to leave his party (eventually becoming a Libertarian), but there are many others in Congress who are just as frustrated. They just can’t express that or their own party will destroy them. The structural changes that have centralized power in Congress have ruined the ability of representatives to legislate, ultimately failing their constituents. The powerful like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are essentially dictators in their parties, forcing allegiance to policies that benefit the special interests that have funded their rise to power. It is all part of a structure that has no way out. While some might propose the solution to all of this is to get special interests out of politics, the Supreme Court made that task a lot tougher in its decision to rule in favor of Citizens United in 2010. Besides, neither party is particularly motivated to get dark money out of politics.
Multiparty Democracy to the Rescue
The only viable solution to the toxicity is a multiparty democracy. Instead of being forced to choose the lesser of two evils, voters would have more tenable options that might represent their views. It would allow for more groups to be represented, reflecting the growing diversity in the US. People would be more engaged and less likely to be turned off by a political system that doesn’t value them. Politicians would also be held to a higher standard in the face of more competition. Most importantly, parties would be forced to actually compromise and build coalitions. The result would be the restoration of societal compatibility.
Americans are fed up with polarization. According to Pew Research, over the past 20 years, the independent class has been growing while the partisan classes are shrinking. There are now more registered independents (37%) than Democrats (33%) or Republicans (26%). Over those twenty years, both parties have sharpened their tribal identities and isolated those who don’t fit into their ever-shrinking box. The US is also unique in that most countries have multi-party systems, and we also have low voter turnout relative to most developed countries. More parties mean more participation in the democratic process. According to Gallup, 63% of Americans believe, "parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed."
Campaign finance imbalances, ballot access laws, and the “wasted vote” syndrome are systematic impediments to third-party success. They are weapons of voter suppression used by Republicans and Democrats. The implementation of ranked-choice voting is something that can alleviate many of these hurdles by giving third parties a fairer shot. Ranked-choice voting disincentivizes negative campaigning through attack ads (which was basically the whole 2016 Presidential campaign) and requires candidates to focus on selling actual policy. It also incentivizes voters to do more research about their choices.
Will The Libertarian Party Be Ready?
While ranked-choice voting would help, the Libertarian Party (LP) can succeed without it. The LP platform essentially mimics what the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists, envisioned for America. Small government, free markets, individual choice, and federalism were chosen to be antidotes to tyranny. There certainly is a market for these principles, but the LP has failed in messaging them effectively enough.
In order to succeed, the LP needs to broaden its tent and avoid gatekeeping. Most Americans have some libertarianism in them – whether being anti-war, pro-capitalism, pro-2nd Amendment, for localism and federalism, pro-immigration, etc. – most people on the left and right identify with at least one libertarian point of view. However, many are deterred by perceived radicalism and slogans like, “Taxation is Theft” and “End the Fed”. There are radical groups within the LP, most notably the anarchists, and they tend to shun those who don’t pass their purity test. However, the party skews heavily towards the pragmatics who focus on the shrinking government to a realistic amount and acknowledge that a certain amount of government is needed in modern-day society. Leaders in the party like Justin Amash, chairman Joe Bishop-Henchman, and former presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen sometimes upset the anarchist faction, but pragmatism is the only realistic strategy to attracting voters and winning elections.
Libertarians also need to refrain from falling into the trap of demonizing Democrats and Republicans. Nobody wants more toxicity. They should instead focus on demonstrating how their policies are the best option for their audience, while respectfully explaining how the duopoly has failed them. LP candidates must also expand their audiences and tailor their pitches to different demographics. For example, Libertarians should be campaigning more to urban African-American populations, focusing on how police brutality and disproportionate incarceration rates are a product of excessive use of force by the state, the war on drugs, qualified immunity laws, and police unions. While Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats about if cops are racist, Libertarians have substantive policy proposals that would make actual differences.
Republicans and Democrats have put Americans in a dangerous territory characterized by animosity, intolerance, and authority. But Americans have proven to be resilient in the face of adversity, and people are waking up to the fact that the two-party system is not working anymore. I joined the Libertarian Party because it stands for what this country was created to be – a place where anyone has the opportunity to live as he or she chooses while respecting the rights of others. I sincerely hope that we can become more like that country that the Founders envisioned, but the two-party system must be destroyed first.
