We're stuck in a badly designed game that makes minor parties dangerous and irrelevant, except for their ability to spoil a two-party race like Trump v Harris.
Hi, thank you, I’m always learning from your writing.
About “Countries that have well-designed multi-party systems, like Germany, tend to have less polarized populations—not that they are immune to rightwing populism, but such parties don’t get total power when they get when they capture 20% of the public, unlike here.”
I’m on my way out of Germany after 4 yrs here. Politically and socially Germany is not pluralistic or multicultural and is as conservative and more homogeneous than the US GOP constituency, despite Germany having a large proportion of ‘Germans with a migrant background’ (translation from the German for non-dual German heritage parents). The multi-party system and electoral system isn’t giving rise to more democratic outcomes (or perhaps I never really understood what democratic is), possibly because Germany doesn’t have term limits for state and federal presidents—which entrenches incumbents and cronyism. Some parties do capture more than 20%, usually the CDU/CSU (the C stands for Christian). Living under these new to me coalition governance systems initially brought me hope but the reality is more stagnation/tradition than progress.
I didn't say it was perfect! However, scholars of comparative politics have found that countries with multi-party systems have lower overall levels of polarization because party leaders are accustomed to needing to form coalitions and share power, and thus they tone down their rhetoric, and their partisans are accustomed to their party sharing power with other parties.
I know, I never said you did! :) What I was working out for my own understanding as I read your post and thought about this correlation is that it would be interesting to go back in US history when there were multi-party systems and look at the who what where how homogenous the voters were. As a baseline for looking at why multi-party systems have overall levels of polarization.
I pretty much arrived in Germany year 1 Covid and watched the Scholz coalition get destroyed by one of its own coalition members (libertarian pseudo-neoliberal FDP, referred to as the Porsche party) with the help of the media owned by Matthias Döpfner (e.g., Bild; he also owns Business Insider and Politico and plans to invest in more US media assets, and one of his sons is/was chief of staff to Peter Thiel) and CDU (Merkel's party) sue the current coalition for not abiding by the constitutional debt brake the CDU/CSU coalition put into the constitution, after decades of disinvesting from public goods, e.g., rail travel (Switzerland no longer allows Deutsche Bahn trains automatic access because they mess up the Swiss on-time system).
My impression after paying attention closely and reading as much as I can (I have a political discourse analysis background) is that Germany has always been polarized along new-sounding terms set by anti-immigrant/identitarian far right+far left: Bio Deutsch versus Pass Deutsch (born German v passport German). As a result, I understand Trump and post-Reagan Tea Party 'conservatives' a bit better: they do not share power within their own party, which seems to act like a coalition, with the reactionaries and radical far right pseudo-christian faction benefiting from identity, identitarian culture wars and a baseline of violence as a way of life the middle class are taxed for while benefiting less and less from their taxes. Germany, at least, doesn't have a guns+god psychosis; it unfortunately has a history of poor 'economic decisions', like the first four decades of the 20th century and more recently allowing a known dictator to circumvent key eastern European countries in building the pipeline that is/was the backbone of German middle class wealth.
Compared to the US, yes, the rhetoric in Germany is toned down but that is a German way of being, which suggests the culture informs the political rhetorical style, more than the multi-party system + coalition-building requirement/power sharing does. Whatever the case, I'm frequently asked about the red hatted senile man in the US and how is he possible, which I answer as best as I can and turn it into a question about the Omas Gegen Rechts (grandmas against nazis) and their need to raise awareness and protest in 2024 Germany.
As has been stated many, many times, the danger that the candidacies of Stein and West pose to Harris is almost entirely due to the Biden administration's refusal to take effective action to stop Israel's war on Gaza. Presumably the Harris people understand this. It may be that 3rd party people in swing states will be persuaded, as the election nears, to vote for Harris as the lesser evil. But a Ryan Grim report on Arab-American voters in Michigan finds that these voters will stay the course and not vote or vote 3rd party. So the Harris/Biden people must weigh the risk of losing the presidential election against the potential costs of modifying their support for Israel's war. Harris supporters who oppose the war should be raising a clamor for Biden/Harris to make some antiwar moves, not just talk. Will Harris supporters speak up about the war? Will Biden/Harris change course before November? I am pessimistic.
Frank: A couple of points in response. 1. I fully agree that Biden ought to suspend offensive weapons deliveries to Israel, but we should recognize that this may not stop Netanyahu and his far-right government. There's some magical thinking going on among people who believe that the US can command Israel to do whatever we say. 2. We should also recognize that Biden is dealing, at least in part, with a mess he inherited from Trump, who killed the Iran nuclear deal. There is a rising camp inside the Iranian regime that thinks maybe this--the post Oct 7 turmoil--is their opportunity to annihilate Israel (god help us if they get stronger). 3. As I have written here multiple times, the left in the US started out after Oct 7 by choosing only one side of the Israel/Palestine binary to uplift, not realizing that this would also strengthen the so-called "pro-Israel" faction in American politics. Had the left instead built a peace movement instead of a pro-Palestine movement, one that included liberal Jewish leaders in Congress instead of pushing them away for not being anti-Zionist enough, we might now be in a stronger position to get the White House to be tougher on Bibi. Threatening to spoil Harris' election is a weak hand to play, not a strong one. 4. Let's leave aside Stein's incoherent and inconsistent foreign policy posture on such topics as Russia, Syria, etc. 5. Ryan Grim is first and foremost an activist, not a journalist. I respect that he has great access to useful sources, but ever since he decided to bet his career on hyping onesided coverage of the conflict, I take his political prognostications with a grain of salt. 6. Harris has more than one path to an electoral victory and it may turn out that she can win while losing Michigan.
Why fusion voting instead of a shift to a parliamentary system? Is it because it is a smaller, more achievable step towards including more voices/perspectives? Or do you think there are disadvantages with a parliamentary system that fusion voting avoids?
Precisely. There is a path to reviving fusion in more states that starts with winning lawsuits, like the one the NJ Moderate Party has filed. And if those succeed and more fusion parties form, then the demand for a shift to a proportional system will have some real legs. Today it's just a far-off dream.
This is fantastic - thank you for introducing me to fusion voting. I'd love to get involved; will read the article and look for ways to do so after November.
Another option is for progressive activists to reshape the Democratic Party from within - as conservative activists organized by the New Right reshaped the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan. Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaigns brought a wave of progressive activists into the Democratic Party - including the powerful black women who backed Kamala Harris for VP and President. More recently, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren brough another new wave. Next year we could recruit and elect progressives in local races across the country - and keep pushing Democrats to the left.
Well, that's what factions inside both major parties believe and are trying to do. Unfortunately they feed off each other, and in the case of the MAGA faction, they've fully captured one major party to disastrous effect. Were fusion legal, we'd probably have a five-party system with the two major parties flanked on their respective right/left, plus a fulcrum party in the center, and occasional one-issue parties arising when there's significant need for attention to some issue that is being generally ignored. I think that scenario would be more vibrant, less polarizing, and frankly more fun than the grind we have now.
Sifry's statement that "... until we change our two-party system, either to a proportional representation system ... voting for third-party candidates in close elections won’t advance your cause ..." has the direction of causation backwards. In fact, two party systems do not adopt proportional representation. The third and fourth and fifth parties have to come first. Whether making fusion legal can help with that is debatable (I think mostly not).
To the extent that the two party system is the problem, it can't be solved by continuing to vote for the "lesser evil".
Given the political viability of fusion is questionable (banned in some 45 states, including 2 that nearly unanimously banned it in the last 15 years after some efforts to use it in DE and SC) and the legal path a question mark, the Alaska and Maine model of ranked choice voting for president sits there waiting for expansion -as may well happen for presidential elections in ballot measure in Oregon (backed by a super impressive coalition) and DC. for other major statewide elections like governor and U.S. Senate this iyear n CO, ID and NV. Notably, the Oregon measure would end up combining with fusion voting (in the Vermont model where a candidate on one ballot line can accept more than one nomination), which is a nifty twist
There are 5 presidential candidates on the ballot in Maine and 8 in Alaska this year. With RCV, the whole "spoiler debate" is very different there.
Hi, thank you, I’m always learning from your writing.
About “Countries that have well-designed multi-party systems, like Germany, tend to have less polarized populations—not that they are immune to rightwing populism, but such parties don’t get total power when they get when they capture 20% of the public, unlike here.”
I’m on my way out of Germany after 4 yrs here. Politically and socially Germany is not pluralistic or multicultural and is as conservative and more homogeneous than the US GOP constituency, despite Germany having a large proportion of ‘Germans with a migrant background’ (translation from the German for non-dual German heritage parents). The multi-party system and electoral system isn’t giving rise to more democratic outcomes (or perhaps I never really understood what democratic is), possibly because Germany doesn’t have term limits for state and federal presidents—which entrenches incumbents and cronyism. Some parties do capture more than 20%, usually the CDU/CSU (the C stands for Christian). Living under these new to me coalition governance systems initially brought me hope but the reality is more stagnation/tradition than progress.
I didn't say it was perfect! However, scholars of comparative politics have found that countries with multi-party systems have lower overall levels of polarization because party leaders are accustomed to needing to form coalitions and share power, and thus they tone down their rhetoric, and their partisans are accustomed to their party sharing power with other parties.
I know, I never said you did! :) What I was working out for my own understanding as I read your post and thought about this correlation is that it would be interesting to go back in US history when there were multi-party systems and look at the who what where how homogenous the voters were. As a baseline for looking at why multi-party systems have overall levels of polarization.
I pretty much arrived in Germany year 1 Covid and watched the Scholz coalition get destroyed by one of its own coalition members (libertarian pseudo-neoliberal FDP, referred to as the Porsche party) with the help of the media owned by Matthias Döpfner (e.g., Bild; he also owns Business Insider and Politico and plans to invest in more US media assets, and one of his sons is/was chief of staff to Peter Thiel) and CDU (Merkel's party) sue the current coalition for not abiding by the constitutional debt brake the CDU/CSU coalition put into the constitution, after decades of disinvesting from public goods, e.g., rail travel (Switzerland no longer allows Deutsche Bahn trains automatic access because they mess up the Swiss on-time system).
My impression after paying attention closely and reading as much as I can (I have a political discourse analysis background) is that Germany has always been polarized along new-sounding terms set by anti-immigrant/identitarian far right+far left: Bio Deutsch versus Pass Deutsch (born German v passport German). As a result, I understand Trump and post-Reagan Tea Party 'conservatives' a bit better: they do not share power within their own party, which seems to act like a coalition, with the reactionaries and radical far right pseudo-christian faction benefiting from identity, identitarian culture wars and a baseline of violence as a way of life the middle class are taxed for while benefiting less and less from their taxes. Germany, at least, doesn't have a guns+god psychosis; it unfortunately has a history of poor 'economic decisions', like the first four decades of the 20th century and more recently allowing a known dictator to circumvent key eastern European countries in building the pipeline that is/was the backbone of German middle class wealth.
Compared to the US, yes, the rhetoric in Germany is toned down but that is a German way of being, which suggests the culture informs the political rhetorical style, more than the multi-party system + coalition-building requirement/power sharing does. Whatever the case, I'm frequently asked about the red hatted senile man in the US and how is he possible, which I answer as best as I can and turn it into a question about the Omas Gegen Rechts (grandmas against nazis) and their need to raise awareness and protest in 2024 Germany.
Again, thanks Micah for all the food for thought.
As has been stated many, many times, the danger that the candidacies of Stein and West pose to Harris is almost entirely due to the Biden administration's refusal to take effective action to stop Israel's war on Gaza. Presumably the Harris people understand this. It may be that 3rd party people in swing states will be persuaded, as the election nears, to vote for Harris as the lesser evil. But a Ryan Grim report on Arab-American voters in Michigan finds that these voters will stay the course and not vote or vote 3rd party. So the Harris/Biden people must weigh the risk of losing the presidential election against the potential costs of modifying their support for Israel's war. Harris supporters who oppose the war should be raising a clamor for Biden/Harris to make some antiwar moves, not just talk. Will Harris supporters speak up about the war? Will Biden/Harris change course before November? I am pessimistic.
Frank: A couple of points in response. 1. I fully agree that Biden ought to suspend offensive weapons deliveries to Israel, but we should recognize that this may not stop Netanyahu and his far-right government. There's some magical thinking going on among people who believe that the US can command Israel to do whatever we say. 2. We should also recognize that Biden is dealing, at least in part, with a mess he inherited from Trump, who killed the Iran nuclear deal. There is a rising camp inside the Iranian regime that thinks maybe this--the post Oct 7 turmoil--is their opportunity to annihilate Israel (god help us if they get stronger). 3. As I have written here multiple times, the left in the US started out after Oct 7 by choosing only one side of the Israel/Palestine binary to uplift, not realizing that this would also strengthen the so-called "pro-Israel" faction in American politics. Had the left instead built a peace movement instead of a pro-Palestine movement, one that included liberal Jewish leaders in Congress instead of pushing them away for not being anti-Zionist enough, we might now be in a stronger position to get the White House to be tougher on Bibi. Threatening to spoil Harris' election is a weak hand to play, not a strong one. 4. Let's leave aside Stein's incoherent and inconsistent foreign policy posture on such topics as Russia, Syria, etc. 5. Ryan Grim is first and foremost an activist, not a journalist. I respect that he has great access to useful sources, but ever since he decided to bet his career on hyping onesided coverage of the conflict, I take his political prognostications with a grain of salt. 6. Harris has more than one path to an electoral victory and it may turn out that she can win while losing Michigan.
great column!
Why fusion voting instead of a shift to a parliamentary system? Is it because it is a smaller, more achievable step towards including more voices/perspectives? Or do you think there are disadvantages with a parliamentary system that fusion voting avoids?
Precisely. There is a path to reviving fusion in more states that starts with winning lawsuits, like the one the NJ Moderate Party has filed. And if those succeed and more fusion parties form, then the demand for a shift to a proportional system will have some real legs. Today it's just a far-off dream.
This is fantastic - thank you for introducing me to fusion voting. I'd love to get involved; will read the article and look for ways to do so after November.
Another option is for progressive activists to reshape the Democratic Party from within - as conservative activists organized by the New Right reshaped the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan. Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaigns brought a wave of progressive activists into the Democratic Party - including the powerful black women who backed Kamala Harris for VP and President. More recently, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren brough another new wave. Next year we could recruit and elect progressives in local races across the country - and keep pushing Democrats to the left.
Well, that's what factions inside both major parties believe and are trying to do. Unfortunately they feed off each other, and in the case of the MAGA faction, they've fully captured one major party to disastrous effect. Were fusion legal, we'd probably have a five-party system with the two major parties flanked on their respective right/left, plus a fulcrum party in the center, and occasional one-issue parties arising when there's significant need for attention to some issue that is being generally ignored. I think that scenario would be more vibrant, less polarizing, and frankly more fun than the grind we have now.
Sifry's statement that "... until we change our two-party system, either to a proportional representation system ... voting for third-party candidates in close elections won’t advance your cause ..." has the direction of causation backwards. In fact, two party systems do not adopt proportional representation. The third and fourth and fifth parties have to come first. Whether making fusion legal can help with that is debatable (I think mostly not).
To the extent that the two party system is the problem, it can't be solved by continuing to vote for the "lesser evil".
Given the political viability of fusion is questionable (banned in some 45 states, including 2 that nearly unanimously banned it in the last 15 years after some efforts to use it in DE and SC) and the legal path a question mark, the Alaska and Maine model of ranked choice voting for president sits there waiting for expansion -as may well happen for presidential elections in ballot measure in Oregon (backed by a super impressive coalition) and DC. for other major statewide elections like governor and U.S. Senate this iyear n CO, ID and NV. Notably, the Oregon measure would end up combining with fusion voting (in the Vermont model where a candidate on one ballot line can accept more than one nomination), which is a nifty twist
There are 5 presidential candidates on the ballot in Maine and 8 in Alaska this year. With RCV, the whole "spoiler debate" is very different there.