Our Democracy Emergency: Q&A with Lee Drutman

In the United States, presidential campaign season is upon us, while America’s crisis of democracy has steadily worsened. Hyper-polarization, political violence, rampant misinformation, and the rise of authoritarianism are just a few signs of a democracy in decline.

What can we expect in the lead up to the 2024 elections? How will our political polarization impact what happens at the polls?

We sat down with Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, to gain insights into today’s landscape, potential dynamics of the 2024 election, and what America needs to fix its broken system.

As we head into the 2024 elections, what do you see as the major factors shaping the current political climate?

Calcification and dissatisfaction. On the one hand, we’re calcified — nobody is changing their mind about the candidates or the parties, and we’re heading towards a rematch of 2020, with only maybe four states even in play for the presidency, a handful of Senate seats that might be close, and maybe at most 30 contested House seats. Almost all voters will vote the same way they did in 2022 and 2020. But yet, Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the state of democracy in America. So, there’s a very weird disconnect between how people behave and vote (the same as they did, hence calcification) and their satisfaction with the outcomes (deeply dissatisfied). Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. Yet here we are. Behaving insanely.

Last year, you wrote that Trump would likely win the 2024 Republican nomination. Recent polls support this. What’s your take on the current battle within the Republican party?

The Republican Party is a broad coalition of groups and voters, who are held together by very little other than their shared hatred for Democrats. There are populists and libertarians, and conservatives of many different types. Some like Trump, some will tolerate him, and some can’t stand him, but hate Democrats more. Trump’s magic trick is the magic trick of all authoritarianism — escalating the conflict to force everyone to pick sides. The more hyper-polarized and hyper-partisan politics are, the more transgressions leaders can get away with. The problem for non-MAGA factions within the Republican Party is that they are too small individually to beat Trump, and they don’t agree amongst themselves on the direction of the party, either.

What might happen if the election results are contested, again?

I worry about this. I have a hard time seeing a scenario in which a close election ends well, and it will almost certainly be a close election. China and Russia, meanwhile, will be doing everything they can to undermine confidence in this election, and stoke violence. Unfortunately, supplying doubt and fear to disaffected partisans is like breaking open a pinata at a kid’s birthday party.

In a recent report, you argue that we need more (and better) political parties to fix our political system. How will more parties help?

The core problem is that our binary party system makes politics an all-or-nothing, us-against-them battle. We need to break what I’ve called the two-party doom loop by getting out of the binary mindset. We know from other countries that have more parties that parties work together to govern and form coalitions, and that voters don’t demonize and hate each other in the same way. We know from other countries that are split into two mega-factions that violence and civil war are real risks. Americans agree on a lot more than we disagree about. But we also have tremendous diversity. Both parties today win elections through demonizing the other party. But a lesser-of-two-evils strategy only works in a two-party system. There is no phrase: “lesser of three evils.” In short, we need more parties to make our politics more fluid, and less us-versus-them, and to engage the many Americans who feel neither of the parties speaks to them or represents them or competes for their votes.

Could the United States ever really embrace a multiparty democracy? Third-party candidates always fail to gain traction. Isn’t that evidence that multiple parties wouldn’t work?

That’s why we need to change the electoral system. Under our current system of single-winner elections, third parties are indeed spoilers or wasted votes. But if we moved to multimember districts for the House with proportional representation, multiple parties would be able to compete for votes, and all votes would matter equally, no matter where voters live — compared to currently, where most voters live in lopsided one-party districts where their votes don’t matter. For the Senate, fusion voting could allow multiple parties to have a say. Fusion voting allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate.

Looking beyond 2024, what gives you hope in this moment?

The tension between calcification and dissatisfaction can’t last forever. We are in what I’ve described as a “meta-stable” state — kind of stuck between the old and unknown. Systems can exist in this meta-stable state for longer than you think. But they can’t forever. At some point, we will find ourselves in a new era, in which our long-overdue democracy upgrade will not only feel possible, but inevitable.

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