How the Two Party System (Mis)Shapes Reality

Here we go – again.

Joe Biden will face off against Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. Presidential election. What joy! The face-off that only a minority of Americans (about 40%) wanted to see is now imminent.

It’s not that I object to President Biden personally, or even very much to the decisions he has made while occupying the Oval Office. Like all U.S. presidents, Biden’s policies and actions have been a mix of wisdom and folly, party-line priorities and broader national interests. Some of these policies have been well-executed (e.g. funding long-term infrastructure needs via the IIJA), while others have been clumsily executed (e.g. the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan).

Joe Biden has generally been an effective President, in Greymantle’s view (many will surely disagree) even if he is a bit old for the job. But I will take old age and experience over old age and madness. That is more or less how Greymantle sees the choice facing Americans in 2024.

Rather, the wariness felt by Greymantle and tens of millions of other Americans toward the Biden vs. Trump rematch stems from a general exhaustion with political factionalism in America. At no time since the Civil War of 1861-65 have Americans been so deeply and passionately divided over the direction of the country. Not since 1861 have Republicans and Democrats been more at odds concerning fundamental legal and economic issues.

People who would have not even thought the phrase “at real risk of civil war” to themselves are now saying it out loud to their friends and on the airwaves – and even, incredibly, to their colleagues at work. I’ve heard it said twice in the past week by two of the most sober and respected professionals in my industry, an industry that makes a point of shying away from controversy.

It’s a grim state of affairs.

HOW THE HELL DID WE GET HERE?

It isn’t the purpose of this post to recount history, but to provide examples of how our two-party system and associated media organs distort facts, emotions and the very fabric of reality in their pursuit of power, as well as to suggest pathways to end the absolute dominance of these two dinosaurs (the two political parties, that is, not Biden and Trump personally).

A word or two of explanation is in order, however, before we get to those aforementioned examples, and Greymantle intends to keep his words short and to-the-point.

Briefly then, there was a time – and I remember that time clearly because I was born before 1980 – when the Democratic and Republican Parties each had their ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ wings. Large numbers of Democrats and Republicans alike found their home in a kind of undeclared and undefined ‘center’ that was all the more robust and politically effective for not having to be defined or labelled.

It just…was. A Utah Republican and an Illinois Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate could amicably negotiate the details of a bill that both agreed was needed to address some pressing national need, and the bill would be passed by Congress with decent bipartisan by-in.

This normal state of affairs dominated in the 1950s and 1960s, and even, by and large, throughout the 1970s and 1980s despite the upheavals of the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras and the “great inflation” of the post-Oil Shock 1970s and early 80s.

Four things brought that famous ‘era of bipartisanship’ to an end:

1. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Without a major external enemy to contend with, the two parties began to see each other as the greatest enemy of the common good.
2. Schemes by campaign strategists and media actors affiliated with the parties to boost the ideological characters of the parties in order to win votes and policy battles. In the short run, this resulted in a number of notable national election victories including the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress and the Democrats’ 2006 mid-term victories. Over the long run, it has led to each party capturing nearly equal 40% shares of the electorate and eviscerated bipartisanship.
3. The proliferation of television and online-based media outlets. The more crowded the media field, the more news outlets ratchet up the use of fear and outrage in their presentation of the news in order to attract viewers. This has resulted in voters becoming more distrustful, angry and fear-filled, which leads them to elect more extreme political representatives.
4. The longer-term effects of the social revolutions of the late 20th century, which have led to a deep and consequential re-sorting of the social constituencies supporting the major parties. These constituencies hold polar opposite views on a number of ‘hot button’ social and economic issues, including abortion rights, transgender rights and accommodations, and climate change.

To provide a trenchant example of #4, observant Christians now vote overwhelmingly for Republicans, while seculars and non-Christians vote mainly for Democrats. Black Americans support Democrats by a 90% to 10% margin, while conservative Southern whites (the descendants the slaveholding class) vote by similar margins for Republicans.

There’s no need to wade into the above causes into greater depth. Greymantle would, however, like to provide a suggestion for further reading to the subscribers of this blog. To get a feeling for how media actors and intellectuals within both parties schemed to make the parties more ideological, consider reading “The Polarizers” by Sam Rosenfeld.

It’s a worthwhile (if somewhat depressing) read. You’ll come away with a solid understanding of the ways in which these intellectuals fooled themselves and their politician colleagues into believing that the majority of Americans would be “on their side” if they became more, rather than less, ideological. In other words, the intellectuals in each party felt that “the Silent Majority” of the country would be with them if they shifted rightward, in the case of the GOP, or leftward, in the case of the Democrats.

WHEN THE TRAIN OF HISTORY HITS A CURVE, THE INTELLECTUALS FALL OFF

Both groups of intellectuals and media enablers referenced above were only half-correct. It turned out that between 10% and 20% of the public on each side was stirred up by ideology (those proportions of the populace translate into roughly 40% of registered voters of each party), but the majority of the public remained solidly in the middle and was basically unmoved by the ideological shift.

Rather, great numbers of Americans became exhausted, disenchanted, and ‘turned off’ by the two main parties’ ideological drift, leading large numbers of voters to disengage from the process altogether. For a recent overview of the mental state of American voters, I cannot recommend more highly this March 22 NY Times opinion piece by David French, formerly of The Dispatch. It’s about a five-minute read and basically diagnoses why roughly 80% of Americans have been totally checked out on the debate over ‘Christian nationalism’. The reason: they don’t give a hoot. They have disengaged.

Voters’ disengagement does not necessarily mean that their views on every major issue have remained the same, however. Clearly, within the “center space” of American politics, there have been changes.

Most important of these changes is a clear shift in Americans’ belief regarding the prudence of providing large multinational U.S. corporations and Wall Street financiers with the foremost authority to determine how the marketplace will direct goods, services, and major investments.

Most Americans still believe strongly in the ‘free market’ and in capitalism – however defined. But they have also come to believe that the largest actors in the marketplace – Goldman Sachs, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, General Motors, etc. – tend to behave solely according to their own economic interests without regard to the interests of the broader American public.

Several common American catchphrases used to express how Americans felt about the relationship between big business and their own welfare. “The business of America is business” originally uttered by President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, is one such saying. Another was “What’s good for General Motors is what’s good for America” attributed to GM CEO Charles E. Wilson in 1953.

Both quotes have been embellished somewhat over the years, but the fact that millions of Americans would repeat them during times of economic upheaval says something about the faith Americans had in the U.S. economic system in the mid-20th century.

That doesn’t seem to be the case following the period of accelerated globalization that began in the late 1970s and lasted up until the Obama Administration of the early to mid-2010s. Clearly, the sheer amount of economic dislocation and associated hardship, which affected millions of American and mainly working-class homes during his era, has had a profound affect on underlying attitudes.

The perception – largely correct, it turns out – that the college-educated and top 10% of wage earners were reaping most of the benefits of offshoring and globalization policies, while the middle and working class bore most of the costs (aside from cheaper imported goods) – has clearly resulted in a leftward economic shift among the majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

For Republican voters, this leftward shift is coded in the right-leaning language of nationalism and “America First”, but amounts to much the same thing policy-wise: tariffs, re-shoring policies and pressure on major corporations to change their errant ways or risk the wrath of Uncle Sam.

For the United States, the downscale effects of globalization on workers without college degrees were the “curve” which the “train of history” hit somewhere around the year 2000. Donald Trump was the resulting shock that ran through the train when it hit that curve. The intellectuals that fell off the train were mostly conservative intellectuals with an absolute faith in ‘the invisible hand’ of the marketplace and the wonders of unconstrained capitalism. They’ve been looking for a new train to ride ever since.

DOMINANT-PARTY REALIGNMENT IS ELUSIVE, DESPITE DRAMATIC UPHEAVALS

With the conservative intellectual enablers of both globalization and the Iraq War discredited in the wake of the Bush II Administration, the time seemed ripe for the Democratic Party to step back into its role as the more dominant of the two U.S. political parties, which was the role it occupied from the mid-1930s up through and including the late 1970s. The Democrats won huge electoral victories at both the state and national levels in 2006 and 2008, capped by the election of Barack Obama as president. They had the power to begin a profound reshaping of national economic policy. What happened?

Three factors intervened, Greymantle believes, that prevented the Democratic Party from assuming the dominant-party role starting in 2009:

1. First, the severity of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis threw the new administration into crisis management mode on Day 1 (i.e. Jan. 20, 2009), consuming time energy at the start of the administration that might have been directed to a major economic policy shake-up.
2. Second, President Obama and his then Vice President, Joe Biden, determined that they would make the expansion of health insurance to the millions of uninsured the central policy objective of their first term in office. The Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’) was adopted in 2010, but at very great political cost. Unlike Roosevelt in the 1934 mid-terms and 1936 general election, Obama lost control of both Houses of Congress in 2010 due to controversy around Obamacare.
3. Third and perhaps most importantly, the Republicans were not willing to come to grips with their policy failures of the previous 20-odd years and adopt fresh policies in response to Democratic victories in 2006-08. Rather, Republican elites and media enablers doubled down on their prior policies, admitting no fault, and chose to adopt an obstructionist attitude toward the Obama Administration and its policies, resorting to gross distortions to confuse the public.

As a result of this confluence of factors, the Democratic Party were unable to advance or develop further their policy agenda and consolidate political power during the Obama Administration.

The Democrats’ inability to shift into full dominant-party mode had baleful long-term effects on both major parties. To whit:

• Democratic electoral reversals in 2010 for the Congress and elsewhere in the early 2010s divided opinions among Democrats as to their policy agenda. Some Democrats believed a less radical agenda would be politically advantageous. Others believed they should adopt a more nakedly left-wing agenda, as this is what the ‘silent majority’ of Americans really wanted.
• Deprived of a measure of political power, particularly in Congress, the center-left policy agenda of the Obama Administration stalled. Had they maintained or enhanced political power, more pieces of the center-left agenda might have been enacted and proven politically successful. Without such developments, Obama relied on executive orders and foreign policy actions to define his and his party’s agenda, with some real controversy (e.g. the ‘Dreamers’ order, the Syria ‘red lines’ debacle, the severe difficulties with the Libya intervention).
• By the end of President Obama’s second term, a restless group of progressives on the party’s left began to challenge the party establishment’s grip on power and policy agenda, steering the party further to the left than actual popular opinion would have normally dictated.
• The Republicans, by choosing to adopt an obstructionist posture, lapsed further into the political pattern of the pre-Civil War southern Democrats, blocking legislation and generally fulminating about the evils of “the other side”. It completed a negative shift in mentality begun in the 90s.
• By entertaining conspiracy theories and flirting with ‘birtherism’ and other far-right myths, GOP voters and some establishment figures began to lose touch with reality and slide towards both extremism and elements of post-liberal thought.

The resorting of demographic groups between the parties and the rising prominence of ‘cultural issues’ related to immigration, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. turned politics and policy into more of a ‘zero sum game’ between the parties. By the mid-2010s, the parties and their electorates had settled into the 40% versus 40% of the electorate pattern they hold today. Less than 20% of registered voters identify as Independent, and the very large 60% to 70% of eligible voters are increasingly disgusted.

HOW THE TWO MAJOR PARTIES AND THEIR ACTIVIST WINGS DISTORT REALITY

So this is where we are. For someone who has lived long enough to remember the prior regime, it’s like taking a train into an unfamiliar country and observing how the natives live.

Strange customs abound. There are new and unimagined taboos aplenty. The way people speak about the commonest things has changed. Vocabulary has been altered and battles explode with some regularity over events that, to a foreigner, seem trivial or incomprehensible.

Is this the manner in which the people of this country choose to spend their time?

One development that factors heavily in the two parties ‘reality distortion fields’ as I will call them, is the emergence of ‘activist wings’ within both parties since the late 1980s.

There have always been people active in politics who have involved themselves in fund-raising, spinning the press, advertising, and rallying support for one or the other policy positions of political parties. But, since the dawn of the 21st century, the social status and sphere of influence of these self-described ‘activists’ has exploded and become a bit, well…ridiculous. As have the lengths to which political consultants and ‘spin doctors’ will go to distort the words of the other side, their willingness to tell outright fibs, and to manufacture fake controversies in order to dominate the news cycle.

Here are a few examples that may prove illustrative:

• The ‘Death Panels‘ canard promoted by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in 2009 during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. The ACA never gave the federal government or any other state or local government the power to convene medical panels to decide whether any patient receiving health insurance under the ACA should have their care discontinued, or authority to euthanize any patients receiving services provided under the ACA. In fact, euthanasia remains broadly illegal in the United States.

• The argument made by Republicans in 2009 and 2010 that ‘the federal government will takeover America’s healthcare if the Affordable Care Act is adopted’. The ACA never amounted to socialized medicine in the style of Britain’s NHS. In fact, it relies on both private insurers and a public option, and keeps private physicians, hospitals and clinics in place. But this canard was widely repeated and widely believed by the public. This lie greatly damaged national levels of trust.

• The ‘Russiagate’ investigation promoted by various elements of the Democratic-aligned press and certain agencies of the federal government (e.g. the FBI) in 2017 and 2018. Greymantle is cautious enough to point out that there have, in fact, been some personal connections between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine and Russian oligarchs (Paul Manafort being the chief). The Mueller Investigation of 2018 could not provide persuasive substantiation, however, of collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump during the 2016 election. The Russians were clearly rooting Trump to win, and certain Russian ‘troll farms’ generated large amounts of misinformation that supported Trump’s chances of victory in the election, but this does not amount to proof of direct collusion.

• During the lead-up to the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act by the U.S. Congress in early 2022, comments of one of Indiana’s two Republican senators, Mike Braun, were interpreted to mean that the right to interracial marriage had been decided in error by the Supreme Court in 1967 in the Loving v. Virginia decision. Senator Braun seemed to be implying that the states should be again given the power to decide this right, and that it could (or should) be overturned. Senator Braun later issued a clarification that he was not suggesting that Loving v. Virginia had been decided in error, but the resulting outcry was astutely exploited by Democratic activists to virtually ensure passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (which enshrines same-sex and interracial marriage rights in federal law), given that to vote against it would not only mean refusing to make the same-sex right national but would also indicate a refusal to support the right to mixed-race marriages. Due in part to this conundrum, though also due to reasons of conscience, 48 Republicans voted in favor of the Act.

• Most recently, Donald Trump’s assertion that a Biden victory in the 2024 election would result in a ‘bloodbath’ for the American auto industry and result in other broad, but unspecified, outbreaks of disorder was spun by Democratically-aligned news organizations to the effect that Trump was threatening that there would be a ‘bloodbath’ in America if he lost the election to Biden.

The above constitutes a very short and choice list of the distortions, exaggerations and outright lies circulated by Republican and Democratic politicians and their media surrogates alike in recent years. A more exhaustive and illuminating list would take up 100 blog postings such as this one.

The broader point we are attempting to make is that the great intensification of political “spin” since the 1990s is having a broadly corrosive effect on the national psyche. That corrosion has led to gridlock at the national level, as Congress has passed much less new legislation in the past 25 years than it did in comparable 25-year periods during the 20th century. Politic gridlock equals policy drift.

THE DISTORTION GOES FAR DEEPER THAN MANUFACTURED CONTROVERSIES

But the ‘reality distortion’ effect created by the near-total dominance and increasing extremism of the two major parties runs much deeper than the intentionally intensified or manufactured controversies created by party leaders. It runs down into Americans’ very perceptions of the choices available to be taken on any major issue.

Hence, gun control has become a zero sum game whereby the slightest strengthening of firearms laws becomes – in the minds of both the pro-gun and a minority of anti-gun activists – a pebble that could set off a landslide of gun control legislation that would eventually make all firearms ownership illegal. Such an outcome is extraordinary unlikely given the right to bear arms included in the U.S. Constitution, but this does not stop millions of Americans who side against gun control legislation from believing it true.

“She’s coming for the guns! She’s coming for the guns!” a reporter for The Atlantic overheard an elderly man say to his grandchildren at a Trump campaign event during the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump and his surrogates denounced the policies of then-candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Then-Senator Clinton certainly was, and remains, firmly in the gun control camp, but the notion that Clinton if elected president would somehow gain the power to “come for the guns” owned by Americans is risible. As long the Second Amendment remains in place, such a thing – a total confiscation of private firearms – remains a thing of pure fantasy. The idea betrays a complete lack of understanding of the U.S. Constitution and the actual workings of the American political system. But is nonetheless widespread.

Another wild misconception directly connected with the pernicious effects on the public mind of a polarized two-party system was the notion, coming in early 2022, that a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade would make abortion illegal across the United States. As in the case of gun control, literally millions of Americans greeted the overturning of Roe as an outrage akin to deleting the First Amendment (or any other amendment) to the Constitution. The immediate reaction was panic.

It took some weeks for many in the pro-abortion camp to understand that the overturning of Roe merely passed the decision to legislate the issue of abortion directly to the states. Many of these states quickly passed among the most liberal abortion laws in the world. A smaller group of states passed legislation restricting abortion severely, while keeping it legal in some cases.

The abortion issue is a good example of the zero-sum thinking that characterizes the most emotional and sensitive issues confronting our nation. For the “anti” side, only a set of chess moves in the direction of a nearly-complete ban will answer. For the “pro” side, only the most liberal of abortion regimes, making abortion legal in effectively all cases, up until the moment before natural birth, will satisfy the desire to “protect” abortion as a fundamental human right. As a facet of “women’s health care” as a matter of fact, as if a human fetus were a brain tumor or a cancerous lesion.

Tax policy, which strangers to America might think far less emotional than abortion of gay rights by virtue of its rather dry and technical application, has become another domain of zero sum thinking. Whereas Republicans and Democrats alike competed to both raise and lower taxes as they saw fit prior to the mid-1990s, for the Republicans these days, any tax increase is evidence of “unchecked tyranny”, is quite likely “unconstitutional” and very likely “the first step on the path to socialism”.

For Democrats, any tax cut must surely be a “giveaway to the very rich” and a cold-hearted “defunding and abandonment” of the poor and vulnerable. Fortunately, at the state level some sanity still prevails. In 2022 and 2023, the Democratic governors and state legislatures of Illinois, Maine, New York and Connecticut enacted tax rebates and limited tax cuts, most of them targeted at low-income residents. Clearly, the blinkering of the national mind at the federal level has not reached all levels of government.

Still, the list of policies and issues were compromise seems all bit impossible is growing.

The only real solution to this trend is not a better campaign finance system, not the final defeat of Donald Trump, not a full-on push to topple the Republicans, however deranged they might presently be, from the seats of government wherever they sit.

The only solution is the end of the two-party system.

THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM MUST BE SUPPLANTED BY A MULTI-PARTY SYSTEM

The end of the American two-party system must surely begin with the establishment of a truly viable third party. But it can’t end there. If a third party were to rise, why not then a fourth party? Why not a fifth party, a sixth party, or a seventh party?

Germany presently has seven major political parties: the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Free Democrats, the Left, the Alternative fur Deutschland, and the Sara Wegenknecht Bloc. This list doesn’t count the Christian Social Union, the sister party to the Christian Democrats, which would take a list of eight parties. Italy has more than one dozen major parties organized into six party blocks. Even the UK, with its Tories and Labour Parties, also has its Liberal Democrats as well as its regional parties such as the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, UKIP, and others.

Clearly, it is possible to run an economically developed advanced democracy through a multi-party system. Many parties diffuse ideology among the political class and better reflect the true diversity of opinion among the electorate. Multi-party systems also tend to isolate extremism more readily in the parties of the political fringes, acting as a sanitary cordon around the extreme ideologues.

The American two-party system has reached a dead end. There will be no shift towards a newly-dominant party among the two, with the other party acquiescing. The pattern that has dominated American politics since 1865 is failing. The way things are going, the underlying patterns of partisanship and hatred, is heading in only two directions: dictatorship of civil war.

The Republicans and Democrats no longer reflect the true spectrum of political opinion that exists among Americans. The excellent ‘Hidden Tribes‘ study of 2018 captured the underlying reality quite brilliantly. In effect, there are seven political ‘tribes’ that exist beneath the surface of American life. Any one of these could become its own party. May the No Labels initiative and Reform Party be a start.

It is a hunger for a decisive break with existing policies and choice that led to the unexpected success of the Ross Perot candidacy in 1992, Donald Trump’s outsider capture of the Republican Party in 2016 and 2020, and is fueling excitement over the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.).

The time has come to put these two dinosaurs to bed. In a coming blog post, we will theorize about the various possibilities for viable third parties and the various pathways by which the United States might arrive at a viable multi-party system.

Until the, I remain —

Greymantle