America is described as having a two-party system, and this is both true and false.
It’s true that there are two major parties–at this time, the Democrats and the Republicans–and that they control almost all federal-level offices. But it’s not true that each party is monolithic. Instead, they are themselves made up of factions that, in other systems, would be considered parties.
This is the key to understanding how the American system differs from other forms of democracy in some ways but is fundamentally equivalent in the ways that count, and is in some ways superior.
Consider the major parties.
The modern Republicans, prior to being taken over by their lunatic fringe, were the party of Movement Conservatism, an alliance among five distinct but compatible groups: the libertarians, traditionalists, anti-communists, neoconservatives, and religious right.
What united them was their opposition to FDR’s New Deal, which they seek to roll back, along with LBJ’s extensions of our civil rights. There are further subdivisions within each group, and some that overlap categories, such as the conservative Catholics. As a whole, they used to be right-wing to far-right and are now far-right to fascist.
The modern Democrats have at least four distinct–and rather unequal–groups, depending how you count them. The dominant group is the center-left liberals, which are under attack by the far-left, socialist-populist “progressives”, and there are also some moderates and even a few (historically Southern) conservatives.
This rough categorization is broken down further into such groups as the union/labor contingent and various parts that are identity-based (such as feminism) or special-interest (such as environmentalism). As a whole, they used to be moderate to left-wing and still are, only with a gentle shift towards the left, despite the far-left wing trying to ungently take over.
The two parties didn’t always represent these particular groups, but the current distribution has been broadly consistent, though not stable, since Nixon’s Southern Strategy got the racist Southerners to come over, turning it into the unambiguous party of white supremacy.
Given this, Trump’s takeover is not an aberration, but rather the predictable culmination of Nixonism. Likewise, the modern Democratic Party was forged under LBJ, who doubled down on FDR’s New Deal and put equal rights front and center with his Civil Rights Acts. Its shift towards supporting LGBTQ rights is just a natural extension of this.
The Republicans like to call themselves the party of Lincoln, but this ignores the historical fact that it went from opposing white supremacy to supporting it, causing Southern white supremacists to go Republican and Black voters to go Democratic. The party that Lincoln was a member of has very little to do with the one Trump leads today. Likewise, the modern Democratic Party has no room for any adherence to its shameful pro-slavery past.
The takeaway here is that both of these major parties are themselves coalitions of factions that work together but constantly jockey for position. They are teams of rivals, and this results in gradual, and sometimes not-so-gradual, change to the very nature of the parties.
The Trumpers, riding on the post-Obama, racist Tea Party wave, sought to displace the Movement Conservatives, with great success. The “progressives” are likewise trying to displace the liberals, with little success. Parties are ever-shifting conglomerations of often-hostile allies somehow held together by their commonalities, including their common enemies.
So while the names are slow to change, the parties themselves still do. According to political theorists, we have gone through one party system after another, with the Nixon/LBJ realignment signaling the start of the 6th system and Trumpism being increasingly viewed as the start of the 7th. For context, Lincoln’s presidency kicked off the 3rd system; party of Lincoln, my ass.
Because voting at the federal level is based on a first-past-the-post system, in which the plurality wins, it is subject to Duverger’s law, which shows that the stable conclusion of such systems is a pair of major parties (although, as shown above, what they’re called and what they represent is far from constant). The two-party system, however, is an inevitable mathematical consequence implicit in our Constitution.
These major parties are banners for factions to band under, not ideologically pure strains. In order to gain power, each tries to run candidates whose positions will garner votes from their local electorate.
This means that candidates have to vary regionally to suit what the people there want. A Democrat in West Virginia, such as Manchin, can be to the right of a Republican in Maine, such as Collins, on at least some issues (although they both wind up voting with their party bloc most of the time, but only after making a lot of noise to impress the locals and ensure re-election). All politics is local because all votes are.
More fundamentally, without techniques such as voter suppression, the parties cannot succeed at the national level while favoring a single faction to the exclusion of all others. They have to cater their platform to broadly appeal to a majority constituency, avoiding any stances so radical as to offend the loosely-affiliated, much less alienate the otherwise-reliable base.
At this point, you might chime in by saying this means that both major parties have to be “the same”. After I finished laughing, I’d point out that anyone who mistakes the fascist Republicans for the liberal Democrats is an idiot or a liar or both. Most likely, they’re an extremist with an axe to grind against democracy, as I’ll explain below.
While the two parties are not the same, they do have to work together to some extent. There has to be enough overlap to allow for compromise and cooperation, as opposed to a scorched-earth approach. When it’s missing, government is dysfunctional.
We saw the beginnings of this under Clinton’s presidency, when Gingrich held the country hostage. We saw it even more clearly when, in rejection of the legitimacy of a Black man in the White House, the RNC shed all resemblance to the loyal opposition and instead embraced obstructionism openly. And it continued under Biden, when McCarthy obstructed the budget, threatening to shut down the government by defaulting on our debts.
The corollary to this need for compromise is that each party has to keep its extremist fringe at bay. For example, back when the Republicans were still keeping up appearances, they disinvited the fascist-lite Birchers from events such as CPAC because they were too embarrassing in their obviousness, always saying the quiet part loud. Now, of course, Birchers are not only invited, but find themselves to be relatively moderate compared to the reigning Trumpers. Likewise, the Democrats have their own fringe that must never be allowed to take control because they’d replace democracy with Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism and ban hamburgers and gasoline.
If we look at parliamentary systems, such as in the UK, things are totally different, yet pretty much the same. It’s still first-past-the-post voting, but instead of picking a candidate who represents a faction of the major party, the faction is itself considered a party. So, for example, instead of voting for a Democrat who’s part of the union faction, you’d vote for a member of the Labour Party. Or, instead of an extreme MAGA Republican, you’d vote for UKIP.
In America, the shape of each coalition is finalized during the primaries. In the UK, the coalitions are instead formed after the election. You still get a ruling coalition, which comprises the plurality of winners, and a (hopefully-loyal) opposition made up of most of the losers, plus some stragglers who refuse to unite with either. It’s effectively a two-party system with the two parties created just-in-time, instead of up front. This leads to a more unstable government, though, which is not actually a good thing.
Remember: to have a functioning government, we need compromise. The government has to be balanced somewhere over the political center of gravity in order to remain stable. It has to roughly follow the will of the people, not just the winners. So democratic systems that are too responsive to elections and jerk around in the face of the political wind end up losing the plot by failing to live up to the goals of democracy.
In American democracy, one of the stabilizing factors is that a vote for a fringe candidate– whether it’s a protest vote for a third party or the political suicide of supporting a candidate in the primary who is too extreme to win the general–acts only as a spoiler. It punishes extremism by making it self-limiting.
This is, for the reasons explained above, a good thing. Extremists have to lose because they represent a faction that is hostile towards governance. If they gain power, they will use to it represent only their own interests, not those of the nation. We saw this with Trump, who was president of MAGA-land, not America.
Of course, extremists are not fond of losing, so they grow to deny the legitimacy of democratic outcomes by insisting that the system is “rigged” against them. It is, in the sense that they don’t represent a view that is palatable to the majority, so they’re going to wind up on the losing side most of the time. Democracy is, by design, disempowering to fringe factions. The “rigging” is that everyone gets a vote.
That’s not to say that all election results have been legitimate. In addition to the systemic voter suppression mentioned earlier, we have had recent presidential elections where the candidate with the most votes–the popular choice–was declared the loser. I’m talking about Al Gore and Hillary Clinton here. We’ve also had extremists who lost legitimately but loudly decried their loss as “rigged”. Now I’m talking about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Ever since the travesty of the 2000 election, there has been increasing interest in other forms of democracy, many of which explicitly allow voting non-strategically. In other words, they let you vote for your absolute favorite without this acting as a spoiler. An example of this would be instant-runoff or ranked voting. Parliamentary systems also share this property to a large extent, since your minor party can still join the ruling coalition.
The fringe groups, particularly on the far left, see these more complicated voting systems as a way to increase their power. After all, if there’s no spoiler penalty associated with voting for an extremist, extremists will get more votes. They laud this as a democratic success, when in fact it would simply decrease stability and further polarize our government. We need both major parties to be under the control of boring, sane moderates, not anti-democratic firebrands.
Not that they care: they keep losing elections so they’ve come to reject democracy itself as inconvenient. They see it as inherently unfair towards them (because they’re fringe) and therefore consider manipulating it in their favor to be perfectly fine. For example, political extremists such as Trump, Sanders, and Stein were entirely comfortable accepting aid from hostile foreign powers such as Russia; this would be anathema to a healthy political party. The pattern continues now with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
So when the fringes say that they want to break the two-party system in the name of democracy, they’re full of shit. They want to break it so that they can rule despite democracy. They want to break it so that they can undermine the core goals of democracy.
In conclusion, the de facto two-party system is inevitable given how we count votes, and would not be improved under a radically different accounting method. Even if we went full parliamentary, we’d still wind up with two broad coalitions and a few fringes. We’d lose stability without gaining in representation. We’d be differently democratic, not more democratic, and not better.
If we actually care about democracy, we need to focus first and foremost on opposing the various forms of–to be blunt–cheating that are used to disenfranchise our citizenry through various forms of voter suppression. We also need to restore the democratic ideal of one person, one vote, whereas Citizens United gives us something closer to one dollar, one vote.
Moreover, we need to block foreign election interference, and to restore confidence in the legitimacy of our government by expanding the profoundly undemocratic SCOTUS. Over time, we can can even begin to deal with difficult-to-change aberrations such as the electoral college (as through an interstate compact), two Senators per state, and the not-quite-proportional House.
But to get there, we have to vote out the extremists and keep them out, over and over, again and again, for as long as it takes. The tree of democracy must be refreshed from election to election with the blood of idealists and extremists.