American Democracy Can't Survive Unless the Far Right Is Marginalized. Here's How to Do It (yahoo.com)
American Democracy Can't Survive Unless the Far Right Is Marginalized. Here's How to Do It
Fri, March 19, 2021, 7:30 AM
As our nation comes to grip with the horrific events of January 6 and watches the Republican Party descend further into Trumpism as it pushes hundreds of restrictive voting laws across the country, the obvious question is how does American democracy come back from all this?
There is a path forward: The super-majority of Americans across the political spectrum who reject the extremism need to come together. This includes the pro-democracy right. But for the pro-democracy right to thrive, we need to reform the U.S. voting system to allow for new parties to emerge outside the existing two-party system. Without electoral reform, third parties are likely to fail as spoilers. But only a new small “l” liberal Republican Party—distinct from the increasingly illiberal Trumpist GOP, can establish a new partisan identity that gives center-right voters a meaningful home. Only a new party can create a distinct pathway to elected office that avoids the combatively hyper-partisan Republican primary voters. A party faction cannot do these things. Left to fight a losing battle in the Republican Party, as the recent CPAC confirmed, the withering pro-democracy faction is up against frightening odds.
Electoral reforms that make space for more parties may seem unlikely. But urgent times call for big changes. And American democracy has done big things before.
First, we need to understand the urgency of the problem. By international standards, the current Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France’s National Rally, and in line with the Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Turkey’s AKP and Poland’s PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.
This is not a new problem. The GOP has been sliding into authoritarianism over two decades, using increasingly demonizing rhetoric against its opponents. But it got worse under Trump’s leadership, and the failure of center-right factions to push back. We are running out of time. What happens in a hyper-polarized party system when a major party turns against the entire system of legitimate elections? Historically, democracy dies.
And yet, if recent months and weeks have highlighted the dangerous extremism of the current Republican Party, they’ve also shown how broadly unpopular such violent extremism actually is. Three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the January 6 mob’s actions, and Trump’s seemingly immovable approval floor dropped by about more than six points. In the days after, only 13 percent of Americans considered themselves “Trump Supporters” while another 16 percent considered themselves “Traditional Republicans.” If “Trump Supporters” were their own party, they’d be about as popular as Germany’s far-right AfD, which polled at about 15 percent for 2019, though their support more recently dropped off to 11 percent.
But the obvious difference is that in Germany, the popular center-right CDU Party, headed by Angela Merkel, was able to form of a governing coalition with the center-left, keeping the AfD far away from power. In the U.S., where governing power can fall to a mere plurality of a plurality, the center-right has been overwhelmed by the far-right in the Republican Party. And because the U.S. has a two-party system, the center-right is largely homeless. If fighting for a place in the GOP is pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill, fighting for a place in the Democratic Party is pushing an even heavier rock up the side of a cliff.
But why is the United States a two-party system? It’s not because voters want just two parties. For decades, majorities of Americans have told pollsters they want more parties to choose from, and registered their dissatisfaction with the two-party system by increasingly identifying as independents. Rather, it’s because the U.S. uses a system of first-past-the-post single-winner plurality elections for Congress. In such a system, votes for third parties are “wasted” and third parties are dismissed as “spoilers.” All ambitious politicians, thus, set their sights on one of the two major parties. And because anybody can run in a party primary, parties have very little control of their candidates. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, was not selected by Republican Party leaders. She simply won her primary, with the support of just 43,813 voters in a district of almost 700,000 residents. Instead of being a minor party candidate, she is now an increasingly prominent Republican.
The U.S. is the only advanced democracy to give voters full control over party primary nominations. In every other advanced democracy, party leaders control nominations. The U.S. is also the only genuine two-party system among advanced democracies—and absent major reform, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
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