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Jan. 26, 2022
Lee Drutman sat down with Zack Beauchamp for a Vox interview on the case for—and obstacles to—transformative election reform.
Last week, the Democrats’ voting rights bills went down in flames, defeated by the Senate filibuster and united Republican opposition. While this doesn’t signal the immediate collapse of American democracy as some have lamented, it does mean that, at least for now, Congress will not take action to repair a political system that is barreling toward a crisis.
At times like these, it’s worth taking a step back to reassess things. Just what exactly are the roots of our current democratic decay, and what can we to do fix it?
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, has a clear answer: transform the way our elections work. In his 2020 book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Drutman argued that the very nature of a two-party system tends toward extreme polarization and conflict. Because voters and parties are forced into binary choices and competition, they come to see the other side not just as rivals but as enemies. What’s more, two-party systems have a tough time keeping extreme anti-democratic parties — like, say, the modern GOP — out of power.