The Tyranny of the Two-Party System

The Tyranny of the Two-Party System

POWER, CONFLICT, AND DEMOCRACY

AMERICAN POLITICS INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO, EDITOR

POWER, CONFLICT, AND DEMOCRACY:

AMERICAN POLITICS INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO, EDITOR

This series focuses on how the will of the people and the public interest are promoted, encouraged, or thwarted. It aims to question not only the direction American politics will take as it enters the twenty-first century but also the direction American politics has already taken.

The series addresses the role of interest groups and social and political movements; openness in American politics; important developments in institutions such as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at all levels of government as well as the bureaucracies thus created; the changing behavior of politicians and political parties; the role of public opinion; and the functioning of mass media. Because problems drive politics, the series also examines important policy issues in both domestic and foreign affairs.

The series welcomes all theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and types of evidence that answer important questions about trends in American politics.

The Tyranny of the Two-Party System

LISA JANE DISCH

       COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS        NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York     Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50467-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Disch, Lisa Jane.

The tyranny of the two-party system / Lisa Jane Disch.

p. cm.—(Power, conflict, and democracy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-231-11034-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

—ISBN 0-231-11035-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Political parties—United States. I. Title. II. Series.

JK2265 .D565 2002

324.273—dc21

2002022542

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

For Steven Gerencser

Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: The Tyranny of the Two-Party System

1. The Politics of Electoral Fusion, 1994–1997

2. The Politics of the Two-Party System

3. The Two-Party System: Genealogy of a Catchphrase

4. The Two-Party System and the Ideology of Process

5. Oppositional Democracy and the Promise of Electoral Fusion

Conclusion: Against the Tyranny of the Two-Party System

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Preface

When I began researching this book I hoped it would participate in renewing and reviving a lost democratic strategy by explaining its simple but esoteric practice. The strategy, called fusion, occurs when a third party combines forces with a dominant party or other smaller parties to run a single candidate on multiple party lines in the general election. Its significance is that it defies the foremost commonplace of our winner-take-all system, that a vote cast for a third party candidate is a vote wasted. Unbeknownst to most contemporary voters, third political parties used fusion in nineteenth-century United States to put dissenting views into the public arena and to survive over time, even though they could not have captured popular majorities. Fusion made possible then something that many citizens wish were possible today: to cast a protest vote that counts and that will not throw the election to the establishment candidate they least prefer.

This book makes two central arguments. The first is that the two-party system as we know it shortchanges democracy because it wastes the votes and silences the voices of dissenters. The second is that the two-party system, as we know it, is an interloper. There is no constitutional warrant for two-party duopoly, nor do winner-take-all elections necessarily set third parties up to fail. These are political constraints on the value of our votes. They were imposed, in part, by antifusion statutes that Republican-dominated legislatures enacted at the turn of the century to put third political parties out of business.

I would never have heard of fusion had it not been for the Twin Cities Area New Party (TCANP), the Minnesota affiliate of the national New Party. The New Party began organizing in 1992 as a progressive alternative to a Democratic Party that was moving rapidly rightward in search of both money and votes. The New Party distinguished itself from other third-party efforts by focusing first and foremost on winning elections, not on elaborating an ideology. In practice this meant that the party was willing to lend its forces to Democrats wherever a stand-alone third party candidacy would spoil the race for a progressive in the major party. Making fusion legal again was critical to the New Party’s pragmatism because it would mean that the party could join major-party candidacies on a ballot line of its own. In 1994 TCANP launched a legal and legislative campaign to lift Minnesota’s antifusion laws, a campaign that (if all went well) would challenge the constitutionality of antifusion statutes nationwide.

This book is, in part, a product of that campaign. I was an active member of TCANP for the duration of the effort to resurrect fusion. I helped canvass neighborhoods to gather signatures for the fusion nominating petitions, worked on public education materials, and learned how to write press releases and Op-Ed submissions. For just over a year, most of these ended up in party file drawers, as the local media could not be persuaded that this effort was newsworthy.

In winter 1996 an appellate court ruling changed all that by declaring Minnesota’s antifusion statutes unconstitutional. The state was obliged to rewrite its law for the November election. Over night, members of TCANP became amateur historians—and lobbyists. We instructed legislators on the past benefits of fusion and attempted to persuade them to bring it back without restrictions. We did the same with journalists. I learned something from this effort that I had previously known only in theory: the very words two-party system stood in the way of change.

Legislators cited the two-party system by way of explaining why third parties are a waste of state resources. Journalists cited the two-party system by way of explaining what is newsworthy. It was not simply that they allowed the two-party system to define the parameters of democratic elections and front-page news. They also invested it with legitimacy, as if it were inherently democratic.

In April 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, overturning the appellate decision. Its ruling impressed me even more with the power that is vested in words. For the majority held that as the traditional two-party system had contributed enormously to sound and effective government, state legislatures had a justifiable interest in enacting electoral regulations (including antifusion statutes) that favor it. Its ruling invented constitutional warrant for one of the most powerful myths of American political culture: that the two-party system is traditional and that it is the secret to the longevity of this democracy.

The Supreme Court ruling forced me to reconsider this project. I had first proposed it, before the ruling came down, anticipating a different outcome. I expected to write a timely book, one that would explain to citizens, legislators, and scholars how fusion had been practiced in the past so that they could best adapt it to the present. As such, the book was shaping up to be a work of reform political science, harkening back to a scholarly ideal that guided the discipline from its outset at the turn of the century.

Reform political scientists regarded themselves as democratic activists with a professional mandate to produce academic knowledge that could be put to practical use. They imagined that political science would enter democratic politics not just as an academic field but as part of an entirely new tradition of political thinking and of counsel to the democratic state.¹ They were particularly concerned to open up democracy by reforms to voting and elections.

Admittedly, the affinities of this work to that earlier ideal were somewhat embarrassing. To begin with, those very reformers had laid the groundwork legislatures seized upon to outlaw fusion. This alone suggested a certain caution in the domain of strategy. In addition, reform political science is an anachronism. It came to an end in the 1950s, when the social sciences undertook to model themselves after a natural science conception of objectivity. It was further discredited in the 1960s, when leftists took democracy to the streets, leaving parties, voting, and elections behind as fixtures of the establishment. Although it did not trouble me to violate the canons of objectivity, to put myself on the side of political parties seemed to violate a politics I identified with even though I am too young to have practiced it.

The Supreme Court ruling came as a disappointment and a relief. Although it was a political setback, it restored me to the comfortable posture of critic to the state rather than its counselor. There was no longer a pressing need to explain fusion so that citizens could put it to use; nonetheless, writing the book felt even more urgent. For over the course of the project, I came to believe that a study that would lay bare the myths that keep the two-party system in business could have an even greater impact on the way we imagine and practice democracy than a handbook for relegalizing fusion would have done.

The story of the politics of fusion, past and present, brings to light the tyranny of the two-party system. It shows how dissenting voices are organized out of electoral politics, and provides new motivation for voting experiments to stimulate participation and make this democracy responsive to a broader range of citizens.

Acknowledgments

This project started with a phone call on a summer evening from a union member and activist named Eric Jensen. His mission: to recruit canvassers for the newly forming Twin Cities Area New Party (TCANP). Steven took the call, committing us to what would stretch into more than two years of leg work in third-party politics and more than five years of research and writing to produce this book. As the time line shows, the writing pulled me away from the activism. I regret that. One thing I learned from the experience, however, was that the rhythms of politics differ from those of scholarly production. If I were to write the book, I could not sustain the interruptions, last-minute meetings, and frantic strategy sessions that the activism seemed to demand. From participating in those sessions, however, I gained insight that no amount of research could have yielded.

I am indebted to the many people who took part in building TCANP and waging the struggle for fusion. Although there are too many to mention each one, I am especially grateful to Cara Letofsky, who helped me to respect organizing as a craft and inculcated me in aspects of its practice. Sunday Alabi set the standard for the citizen-activist. I learned alongside my University of Minnesota colleagues M. J. Maynes and Barbara Laslett just how rewarding and how hazardous it can be for scholars to practice politics. Working for TCANP took place on the streets and in the state capital as well. Joe Mansky of the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office generously shared his knowledge of ballot and election law. State Senator John Marty, who did not support fusion’s relegalization, took the movement seriously and made reasoned arguments against it. State Senators Sandra Pappas and Ellen Anderson, together with State Representative Karen Clark lent legitimacy to TCANP by accepting its fusion nominations. State Representative Andy Dawkins set an inspiring example for what a politician can be by his principled commitment to democratic innovation, his eloquence on its behalf, and his willingness to burn leisure time to make it happen.

One challenge to writing a book that crosses specialties within an academic field is imagining how it will be received by scholars with whom one does not ordinarily converse. I had a wealth of resources to meet this challenge, thanks to my American politics colleagues in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota who gave me the benefit of their knowledge, not to mention the benefit of the doubt. Larry Jacobs made this a book. He urged me to write it, set me off into the wilderness of party scholarship with a rough map and a great compass, and helped me prune an argument out of an overgrown first draft. Virginia Gray and Bill Flanigan leant me books and bibliographies. August Nimtz first suggested to me that the subversive potential of the Timmons case lay in its revealing how the Supreme Court reproduces institutions like two-partyism. Also crucial to realizing this project were opportunities to present it to colleagues and graduate students beyond the University of Minnesota. I thank John Aldrich, Kim Curtis, Jeffrey Isaac, Jim Stimson, and Michael and Catherine Zuckert for inviting me to give colloquia at their departments. I did my first year of concentrated research on this project in South Bend, Indiana, where I was warmly welcomed into the political science community of Indiana University South Bend by John Lewis and where I benefited from the prompt and efficient work of the interlibrary loan staff at Schurz Library.

Many colleagues took the time to read this manuscript and provide written comments. I thank John Aldrich, Douglas Amy, Ike Balbus, Benjamin Barber, Susan Bickford, Bruce Braun, Emily Hauptmann, Bob Grady, Jim Johnson, Jeffrey Isaac, Jason Kassel, Greg MacAvoy, Jeani O’Brien, Jennifer Pierce, Fred Solop, Paul Soper, Les Thiele, and Catherine Zuckert. I am indebted to Andrew Seligsohn, who found the elusive argument of chapter 5. I thank Martina Anderson, whose labor on the endnotes and references shaved two months off the production time of this book. Greg MacAvoy persuaded me that party scholars would actually enjoy reading a discourse analysis of their writings. Susan Bickford lent clarity and focus to the argument at times when I struggled to formulate it. Sam Chambers gave me the gift of reading three drafts of this manuscript, filling the margins with praise, sound rephrasings, and observations that read my mind—even where I had not yet managed to put thoughts to paper. Sam’s enthusiastic annotations guided my many revisions of this project and helped to keep doubt at bay. Finally, I thank Benjamin R. Barber, who continues to mentor me as a writer and thinker, fifteen years out of graduate school. Although I talk back to him in these pages as always, I trust he will regard them as a tribute to the example he sets as a scholar and public intellectual.

That Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998 drew public attention to third political parties and opened opportunities for me to formulate the arguments of this work to interested citizens. For these opportunities I thank Ethele Krawetz and the members of the St. Paul College Club, the editors of Minnesota Law and Politics, and especially Katherine Lanpher, host of Midmorning at Minnesota Public Radio, whose listeners brought this project alive.

The University of Minnesota supported my writing with a year’s sabbatical, which was funded by the College of Liberal Arts and a Bush Supplementary Sabbatical Grant. I thank Dean Steven J. Rosenstone for endorsing my proposal to the Bush review committee. An undivided summer’s work was made possible by a works-in-progress grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Minnesota State Legislature.

At Columbia University Press I am fortunate to have had the patience, good humor, and excellent advice of editor John Michel and series editor Robert J. Shapiro. John has buoyed me with his jokes about Minnesota’s weather as well as its political idiosyncracies; royalties permitting, I hope to send him a Jesse Ventura action figure doll. It has been a pleasure working with Susan Pensak, who made copyediting a creative process and whose precision sharpened my prose.

This is the first time in my academic career that I have written a book whose details I could share with my parents, Ed and Elaine Disch. They raised me to be engaged in politics, taking me on my first political marches during the struggle for integration in the sixties and to my first presidential convention in Chicago, 1968. As lifelong Democrats, they may not agree with much in this book, but they will surely recognize the spirit that animates it.

Steven Gerencser has done everything for this project, short of actually putting words to paper. We joked throughout that he should really have been the one to undertake it, with his mind for the details of politics—especially state politics—his propensity to argue with the radio, and the joy it gives him to talk about politics. I dedicate this book to him for sharing all that with me, for convincing me that I could do it—and so much more.

Introduction

The Tyranny of the Two-Party System

On November 3, 1998, Minnesota’s voters handed the nation a big surprise. They turned out in near record-breaking numbers to elect Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura to the state’s highest executive office. Although Minnesotans made front-page news the morning after, it was not for electing their first third-party governor in over half a century. The New York Times ran a full-color photo of Jesse the Body that said it all: Minnesota’s governor-elect is Bozo the clown on steroids.

How could the mild-mannered folk of Lake Wobegon elect a head-butting sport celebrity to lead their state? National and local news analysts cast it as a failure of civic judgment. The New York Times charged that Minnesotans were faked out by an underplayed ad campaign into believing that a Ventura vote made them part of a small, independent-minded community making a creative choice.¹ The Minneapolis Star Tribune apologized for the election as a reawakening of a cantankerous populism that has always had a home in Minnesota.² One editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press denounced the result as a triumph for political showmanship, anti-intellectualism and the trivialization of the electoral process.³

Jesse Ventura is a political anomaly. This is not because he is six feet, four inches. It is not because he once made a lemon-yellow feather boa the accessory of choice for his pink tuxedo. It is not even because his campaign ads featured him as a twelve-inch plastic action figure and as Rodin’s thinker (wearing gym shorts). The anomaly is that he trounced two well-respected establishment candidates as an alternative party challenger—and did so without spending a fortune on his campaign, resorting to attack ads, or targeting any single disaffected demographic.⁴ Jesse Ventura was every inch the Minnesota phenomenon the pundits made him out to be. But this was due neither to the state’s populist political culture nor to its hick susceptibility to Ventura’s star appeal. The state’s election and campaign finance law made it uniquely possible for Ventura’s supporters to defy the most prominent of our copybook maxims about democracy.⁵ Ventura invoked this maxim on election night when, finding the one place where the vernacular of action heroes meets that of political scientists, he boasted, Well guess what? Those ‘wasted votes’ wasted them.⁶

More surprising than the prospect of Jesse the Body as governor was the fact that Minnesota ballot, registration, and election law made his election possible: Ventura subsidized his challenger candidacy with the resources of the very establishment he sought to overturn. Although Newt Gingrich attempted to claim him as a Republican, and others simply called him an independent, the fact is that Jesse Ventura ran as a party candidate. He ran on the ballot line of the Reform party, which had achieved major party status in Minnesota by garnering 5 percent of the vote with a 1994 United States senate candidacy. This was significant because of the benefits that major party status carries with it in Minnesota.

When a third party qualifies as a major party, it typically earns a guaranteed ballot line, which is access to compete on a playing field that—while open—nonetheless remains strikingly unequal. Established major parties enjoy credibility with citizens, mass media, and contributors, which ensures they will capture the lion’s share of resources, publicity, and votes. In Minnesota major party status brings access to events and resources that offset these disadvantages. Major party candidates enjoy the right to participate in televised debates, town meetings, and other organized opinion forums on public radio and at the state fair. These occasions are significant not only for the exposure but for the engagement: they force establishment candidates to go head-to-head with third-party challengers.

Major party candidates also participate in the state’s comprehensive campaign finance program. To major party candidates who agree to accept spending limits and who demonstrate popular support (by raising a sum—variable by office—in fifty-dollar donations) this program provides two forms of subsidy. The first of these is block grant money, which is allocated differentially by office but shared equally between the candidates for any given office, regardless whether theirs is a challenger or an established major party. The second of these, which exists in no other state, is the small donation rebate program, which provides in-cash rebates to individuals for small donations. Contribute fifty dollars to the candidate or (qualified) party of your choice and look for a reimbursement check from the state in approximately six weeks. This program recognizes that today’s high-technology elections have made political contributions as much or more important a form of political participation as the ballot. It is unique in providing candidates an incentive to mobilize money as they would (ideally) mobilize votes: from a broad base.

The last feature of Minnesota’s party system that played out to Ventura’s advantage was election-day registration, a reform that the state adopted in 1976 to revive flagging voter turn out rates. Just over 15 percent of the electorate took advantage of the provision in 1998. There is good reason to assume that many of these were Ventura voters. Preelection polling picked up a surge for Ventura in the last week of October; this lured many disaffected and first-time voters to the polls.⁷ In most states that surge would have come too late for those voters to register; in Minnesota election-day registration made it a quantifiable promise that a Ventura vote might not be wasted.

Although the significance to Ventura’s victory of these regulatory openings can hardly be exaggerated, they were largely overlooked by the media—local and nationwide. Deadline pressure had something to do with this oversight, to be sure. But it is also consistent with patterns of coverage that discredit third-party candidates. It was far less disruptive to frame Ventura’s election as a celebrity challenge to the two-party system than as a regulatory one. To emphasize the institutional innovations that helped make it possible would be to disclose what Theodore Lowi has called one of the best-kept secrets in American politics… that the two-party system has long been brain dead—kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. [It] would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IV’s were cut.⁸

Certainly, Minnesota had not pulled the plug on the two-party system. Nonetheless, it had removed some of the prerogatives that protect the two-party status quo in most other states. The analysts who wrote off Ventura’s election as an effect of wrestler chic, a harbinger of the untutored voting habits of Generation X, or as a resurgence of Minnesota populism did their readers a disservice.⁹ By exaggerating the idiosyncracies of Minnesota’s political culture, and glossing over the regulatory innovations that render Minnesota a relatively hospitable ground for third-party movements, they stepped up the life support to the two-party establishment.

Ventura’s achievement wastes the wasted vote maxim more profoundly than even he was inclined to boast because it calls two of our most trusted political axioms into question. The first of these holds the two-party system to be immutable, a fixed point of the political universe whose constancy is mathematical and conclusive.¹⁰ The second, which follows from the first, holds a third-party vote to be wasted by the very logic of single-member district/plurality rule. So self-evident are these truths that they compel even those of us who are dissatisfied with the two-party system to cast a vote within its terms—if we vote at all. This produces what V. O. Key has called the ancient dilemma of third-party sympathizers.¹¹ It prevents us from voting our convictions because, as much as we may say that the trouble with the major parties is that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between them, we continue to perceive enough of a difference that we cannot bring ourselves to cast a third-party vote, if doing so might throw the election to the establishment candidate we least prefer.

Ventura’s victory challenged the axiomatic status of these truths and pointed to an escape from the dilemma to which they lead. By prevailing in a state where participatory reforms have (unintentionally) created a hospitable environment for third-party efforts, he showed that it is not the logic of winner-take-all elections that dooms third-party candidacies to failure but rather the politics of the two-party system. Ventura’s victory disclosed this politics. It revealed the extent to which the two-party system is just another a regulatory system, one made possible and constituted through laws, administrative practices, and voter expectations.¹² Like any institution, it is no fixed point against which everything else must