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Excerpt from "What Happened to Bernie Sanders", Act II - A BANKRUPT INSTITUTION
"The concept of a democracy dominated by just two parties is, it turns out, a uniquely American phenomenon. In "The Tyranny of the Two-Party System" (2002), author Lisa Jane Disch illustrates how the "doctrine of the two-paty system" came to be enshrined as the very linchpin of
the American system-despite the fact that political parties, much less the concept of a system dominated by two parties, are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (much like there is no mention of democracy).
According to Disch, 'the two-party system is the focal point of an American citul religion'. She identifies three core tents underlying this doctrine:
1) the rise of two dominant, major political parties is an inevitable result given the manner in which the United States' electoral system is structured;
2) the two-party system is a 'timeless and unchanging' feature of the U.S. political system; and 3) without the two-party system, there can be no democratic progress.
As we have seen, the language in the Charter and Bylaws of the Democratic Party reflects the notion that the two major parties are intertwined with the very concept of American democracy, perhaps best captured by the preamble's assertion that
'the vitality of the Nation's political institutions have been the foundation of its enduring strength.' But as Disch demonstrates, the two-party doctrine-which has been employed time and time again to justify the primacy of all others-it largely the stuff of myth.
Not only that, and putting aside the question of number for a moment, the notion that political parties are inseparable from American democracy is sheer fallacy. As noted, parties are strangers to the Constitution, and they also did not exist in the colonies.
Indeed, the concept of popularly based political parties-i.e., organizations that mobilize groups of voters with the aim of influencing policy and electing candidates to office- did not emerge until the early nineteenth century, at the state level, and as a means of challenging
constitutional restrictions on popular sovereignty (such as the limitation of voting privileges to white male property owners). The Founding Fathers expressed great skepticism about devices that promoted popular influence on government.
In Disch's words, 'if the political party is an American tradition, it is...as an innovation contrary to the design of the Constitution.'
As it turns out, the concept that domination of the political system by just two parties is essential to American democracy - the core of the two-party system doctrine which has come to be virtually unquestioned as a prevailing feature of American political life -
is even less of an American tradition. While two major, national party organizations did emerge by the late 1830s and early 1840s (the Democrats and the Whigs), they existed in vigorous competition with third parties-including the Know-Nothings, the Liberty and Free Soil Parties,
the People's Party, and the Republican Party - throughoutt most of the nineteenth century. At various junctures, third parties 1) controlled various state legislatures and governorships; 2) regularly captured five percent or more of the popular vote in presidential elections;
and 3) deployed electoral strategies, such as 'fusion', to actually swing the balance of power in presidential, gubenatorial, and congressional elections.
In 1860, a party which only six years earlier had been a third party alongside the Democrats and the Whigs won the presidency when Lincoln was elected as a Republican.
Our politics came to be dominated by two major parties not due to any inherent feature of the system, but because at the dawn of the twentieth century, states began passing laws that effectively created and protected a two-party duopoly.
Disch describes how the states seized control of the means of the nation's electoral system from the parties themselves. Whereas previously, 'elections were open to all parties that could afford to print and distribute a ticket',
the adoption of the 'Australian system' beginning in 1890 'gave the state the authority and responsibility for regulating nominations, campaign procedures, and other party activites.'
This newfound authority meant, in the words of historian Peter H. Argersinger, that 'those who controlled the state thus gained the power to structure the system in their won behalf, to frustrate or weaken their opponents,
in a manner that would have astounded their predecessors and that was not only effective but by definition legal.'
Such power was the genesis of ballot access laws and other onerous restrictions on the ability of third parties to meaningfully participate in the electoral process, a framework that exists to this day.
At the time, such laws including those preventing third parties from 'fusing' their ballot lines with the candidates of major parties, were decried as 'providing for the extinction and effacement of all parties but the Democratic and Republican.'
...However one looks at this situation, and contrary to the historical and political theoretical mythologies proffered in support of the two-party duopoly,
the two parties' dominance throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been anything but beneficial to the state of American democracy."
"Writing in 1965, political scientist Walter Dean Burnham observed that the contruction of the two-party duopoly in tghbe 1890s had also laid the groundwork for transforming a 'thoroughly democratized' American political system into an 'oligarchy'"
