It was late in the morning on July 10, 2011, and I was on a bottomless mimosa brunch date on U Street in DC. We were sitting at a counter against the restaurant's front window, watching people outside enjoying a sunny, 86-degree day. The TVs behind us were showing the US women's soccer team’s World Cup quarterfinal match against Brazil. When Team USA won in penalties after Abby Wambach’s legendary game-tying goal in the final minute of extra time, whoops and cheers rippled through the attentive patrons at tables behind us. But I was pouting. I had just checked the Washington Post app and seen that John Boehner had broken off negotiations with President Obama on a deal to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit because it had leaked that the plan they were working on would include new taxes. The approaching debt ceiling had caused respected political observers like Mark Halperin to predict that the President and Congress would strike a "Grand Bargain," and that the US Government would begin to wind down the long term deficit that politicians my whole life had told me was an existential threat and done nothing about.
A few swipes on my iPhone 4, and all such hopes were set back further than they had ever been. For several minutes, I tried to convey my anger at politics to my date via a profane stream of incoherent consciousness. She nodded along politely, and said kind words of sympathy. She probably thought I was really weird.
Four years later, I remember this as the moment I relinquished hope that Congress could function in our two-party system. The uncompromising partisan forces that caused the Grand Bargain to fall apart, and the system that allows them to exist the way they do, are still in place. If we’re ever going to have a deficit-reducing compromise — and at some point, our national livelihood will depend on it — we need to do something fundamental to address the role that the most extreme political actors play in our system of government.
Today’s two-party system gives extremist factions more power in the policymaking process than their level of public support indicates they should have. Each party’s most vocal and dedicated supporters tend to have the most extreme right- or left-wing opinions on issues. Congressional leaders must remain in good standing with these extreme factions, or risk losing the stream of money and volunteer hours that keep the party afloat and the leaders in their jobs. This can prevent Congress from acting on critical issues, even when a clear majority of the public agrees on what Congress should do. It happens all the time.
The brunch-ruining episode from 2011 is the best (worst?) example. The date by which Congress needed to either pass legislation raising the US Treasury’s debt limit or allow the nation to default on its obligations was rapidly approaching. A week after Boehner broke off negotiations with the President on the beautiful Sunday, the two sides came together to try again, and after a meeting at the White House on July 17th, they had a tentative agreement: $1.4 trillion in spending cuts with $800 billion in new revenues, most of which would have to come from closing loopholes and deductions in the tax code, not from higher tax rates. In fact, under this agreement, the top income tax rate would go down a few points. All things considered, it was a pretty sweet deal for Republicans. Boehner agreed in principle, polls showed that a majority of Americans supported their general approach, and if the bill had been allowed a vote in the House, it wouldn’t have been a landslide vote, but it would have passed.
But since Obama’s election, the long-documented rightward movement of the Republican Party accelerated, and the conservative wing of the GOP came to equate any compromise with Democrats with total defeat. After Boehner and Obama’s breakthrough negotiating session, partisan forces intervened. Democrats in Congress were upset at the unbalanced ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, so the President hesitated for a few days. Meanwhile, House conservatives made it clear they opposed any bill to reduce the deficit except by spending cuts alone. If Boehner opposed them openly, it would likely have cost him his job. So by the time Obama called Boehner to finalize their initial agreement, Boehner told him it wasn’t going to happen. Legislation that would have made progress towards solving what is arguably the country’s most dire long-term problem died because of the opposition of an uncompromising factions that dictated terms to party leadership. It didn’t matter that most Americans, and most of their elected representatives, understood that deficit reduction would have to happen through compromise.
The United States would have a much better chance at solving its most entrenched, long-term problems if relative moderates on the right and left — people who have firm convictions, but who recognize that meeting their opponents halfway is the only way to govern — could hold office without subjecting their agendas or behavior to factions for whom ideological purity is paramount. This could only happen if extremists left the Democrats and Republicans and formed their own parties — ending the two-party system that we’ve had since our founding.
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People talk all the time about ending the two-party system. Occasionally, a third party will win a significant portion of the population in a presidential election. Yet they always quickly dissolve.
That’s because a two-party system is baked into our political DNA by our first-past-the-post election system. In a first-past-the-post system, representatives for a deliberative body (like the House of Representatives or the Electoral College) are determined by which candidate achieves the greatest number of votes in a geographic area.
This system limits voters' choices by forcing them to choose only from candidates that they think can win in their area. If you are extremely liberal, you may feel that the Socialist Party reflects your values better than any other, but you know that only a Democrat or a Republican has any chance of winning a plurality of votes in your district. You want your vote to impact the election, and you know that if you don’t vote for the Democrat, it increases the likelihood that the Republican (who you really hate) will win. Because of this calculation, many extreme voters end up casting ballots for Democrats or Republicans only because they are the "lesser of two evils.”
In a system of proportional representation (what France has), each party ranks their candidates for office in a list. Voters cast ballots for a party list, not for an individual candidate. When the votes are counted, representatives are selected from the party lists in proportion to the percentage of the vote each party received. This eliminates the “lesser of two evils” calculation because voters know that whichever party they support has a strong chance of being represented even if that party doesn’t get more than 50% in any geographic area. (watch this video on for a much clearer and more entertaining description)
If proportional representation were implemented in the United States, fringe parties like the Socialists, the Greens, the Libertarians, and the Conservatives would receive much more public support than they do today because of this simple change in the ballot-box decision making.
Over time, the most extreme liberals or conservatives, or those whose views don’t fit on either side of the left/right divide, would grow tired of trying to influence the agenda of the mainstream parties through insurgent primary campaigns or twelve-hour filibusters and start to look at the growing legitimacy of newly empowered fringe parties with envy. I bet most would see the appeal of grouping up with those who are more aligned with their political philosophies. Extremists like Ted Cruz have said that the problem with unpopular Republicans of the last fifteen years like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney was that they weren’t authentically conservative enough, and that if the GOP would nominate a “true believer” like Cruz himself, his ideological stridency would inspire some “silent majority” of true conservatives to rise up from obscurity and take the presidency. I bet Cruz and others like him would be interested in testing this presumption by running on a platform of purity with a slate of like-minded conservative radicals. Other leaders who would likely move to fringe parties include avowed socialists like Bernie Sanders and dedicated libertarians like Gary Johnson.
The Democratic and Republican parties would remain full of those politicians who have opposing views and firm convictions, who want to get the best deal possible, but recognize that compromise is better than inaction. They could set their agendas and vote as they please without worrying about being “primaried” by the ideologues who aren’t in the same party anymore.
Might not these empowered fringe parties win more votes than both Democrats and Republicans, continuing the reign of extreme factions as the agenda-setting forces in American politics? It’s a fair question to ask. A purely conservative party would get a lot of public support.
But I think that Democrats and Republicans, without the uncompromising fringe activists pushing them to the right or the left, would become even more popular. The culture of gridlock that exists today hurts both parties; by 53% to 25%, American adults believe that lawmakers should compromise rather than stick to principles, according to a Gallup poll conducted in September of 2013. In June of 2011, a month before House Republicans wouldn’t support a deficit reduction plan because it included some tax increases, 59% of American adults said that deficit reduction must come from a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, rather than one or the other.
Meanwhile, a proportional system could boost overall voting turnout, to the benefit of moderate parties. The embarrassingly low rate at which American adults participate in elections is related to polarization. The most polarized citizens are still politically active: according to the Pew Center’s 2014 study on polarization, 78% of consistent conservatives and 58% of consistent liberals always vote. It’s the moderates who aren’t showing up: only 43% of “mostly liberal” citizens and 39% of those with “mixed” positions vote regularly.
Perhaps if those who want their leaders to compromise felt they had someone to vote for who shared their disposition, they would vote at higher rates. And if they did vote more, they would become a growing base of power for the more ideologically flexible versions of Democrats and Republicans that could exist under a proportional election system.
Great Britain has been a two-party state for most of its democratic history, but in recent years has seen more radical parties like the SNP and UKIP grow in prominence. Their recent election is a plausible scenario for what may happen if we end the two-party system in the US. In the run-up to the vote, the Washington Post predicted that chaos would reign in Parliament, as the rising popularity of these erstwhile fringe factions undermined public support for Labour and the Conservatives. But Tory leader David Cameron, who has hewn close to a moderate path in both policy and rhetoric since his ascension to the premiership in 2010, won a more decisive majority in Parliament than he had five years ago. Despite rising polarization and a fracturing of traditional coalitions, a moderate platform and message is still what most voters in the UK wanted leading their government.
A proportional system would give every kind of voter the hope of authentic representation. In doing so, it would empower voters and politicians who support compromise — the essence of a democratic system.
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A proportional system in the US would overhaul how we elect presidents and members of the House of Representatives. Members of the Electoral College would be apportioned state-by-state— so if the Green Party won 10% of the presidential vote in a 10-elector state like Wisconsin, one of the electors sent to the college would be committed to vote for the Green Party’s presidential nominee. But this would put minority parties at a disadvantage in states with only three electoral votes, as they would have to achieve 33% or higher to be apportioned a single elector. To correct for this problem, we could increase the total size of the electoral college tenfold.
Members of the House of Representatives could be apportioned nationally, eliminating congressional districts. All parties could still hold primaries to determine which candidates make it onto the party lists, and at what rank. Parties could structure those primaries so that every region of every state in the country is represented by at least one person on each ranked list.
The Senate would have to remain unchanged. The upper chamber was explicitly created to give small jurisdictions a forum where they have as much power as large ones, which works directly against the principles underlying proportional representation. At first, only Democrats and Republicans would populate the Senate.
That’s ok, because in our current governing crisis, the Senate isn’t the problem. Senators are, by virtue of representing entire states over six year terms, more accommodating and flexible than members of the House. It was the Senate that passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2013 (just like they did back in 2006). And even if the Senate were still comprised only of Democrats and Republicans, the ability to elect presidents and House members will allow minor parties to attract national followings, build organizations, and have a hand in governing. Over time, one of the erstwhile minor parties could contemplate winning a plurality in a Senate race.
I recognize that the amendments required to enact proportional representation would reshape the Constitution more fundamentally than voters are comfortable with. Selecting someone to represent a geographic area's unique perspective is central to most Americans’ understanding of democracy. But the political forces that encouraged consensus in government for most of our history have faded away in the last few decades: every issue stance taken by a politician places her on one side of the national Red/Blue culture war; regional issues that used to supersede the national debate matter less than they ever have; and changes in our lifestyles and how we consume the news allow people to insulate themselves from different perspectives. In a proportional system, voters could still have their local communities be represented in state government, which is the logical venue for discussion of unique local issues, anyway.
There is philosophical precedent for redesigning our political system to blunt the influence of extreme groups. James Madison wrote in Federalist #10 that “among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” Two hundred and some years later, the violence of our factions is choking off our essential democratic functions. I don’t want those few days before I checked my phone at brunch to be the closest America ever gets to solving the debt crisis. To ensure healthy democracy for the next two hundred, we should be open to fundamental changes in how we practice it.