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American democracy is in crisis, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop offers a big and bold plan. The true crisis of American democracy is that two parties are too few. Deftly weaving together history, theory and political science research, Drutman shows the only to break the binary, zero-sum toxic partisanship is to break it apart. America needs more partisanship, rather than less, but in the form of more parties. In this wide-ranging, learned, but highly accessible book, Drutman charts an exciting path forward that might just save the country.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I: Origins
- 1 - What the Framers Got Right and What They Got Wrong
- 2 - The Paradox of Partisanship
- 3 - The Great Reordering of the Parties
- 4 - The Collpase of the Four-Party System and the Rise of Zero-Sum Politics
- PART II: The Contemporary Crisis
- 5 - The New Era of Toxic Politics
- 6 - All Politics Is Conflict; Not All Confllict Is Toxic
- 7 - The Breakdown of Political Fairness
- PART III: The Solution
- 8 - Designing the Save American Democracy Act
- 9 - Two Few: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
- 10 - The Politics of Electoral Reform
- 11 - The Future of American Democracy
- Afterword
- Acknowledgments
- Notes Index
About the author
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015) and winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy." In addition, he writes regularly for Polyarchy, a Vox blog. Drutman also teaches in the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Summary
A compelling case for large-scale electoral reform.
American democracy is at an impasse. After years of zero-sum partisan trench warfare, our political institutions are deteriorating. Our norms are collapsing. Democrats and Republicans no longer merely argue; they cut off contact with each other. In short, the two-party system is breaking our democracy, and driving us all crazy.
Deftly weaving together history, democratic theory, and cutting edge political science research, Drutman tells the story of how American politics became so toxic, why the country is trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare, and why it is destroying the shared sense of fairness and legitimacy on which democracy depends. He argues that the only way out is to have more partisanship-more parties, to short-circuit the zero-sum nature of binary partisan conflict. American democracy was once stable because the two parties held within them multiple factions, which made it possible to assemble flexible majorities and kept the temperature of political combat from overheating. But as conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northeastern Republicans disappeared, partisan conflict flattened and pulled apart. Once the parties fully separated, toxic partisanship took over. With the two parties divided over competing visions of national identity, Democrats and Republicans no longer see each other as opponents, but as enemies. And the more the conflict escalates, the shakier our democracy feels.
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop makes a compelling case for large-scale electoral reform--importantly, reform not requiring a constitutional amendment-that would give America more parties, making American democracy more representative, more responsive, and ultimately more stable.
Additional text
Rather than hoping to find ways to fix our system of government, read this book for what's in the middle: a thorough, incisive, and passionate diagnosis of how we broke it in the first place.
