Crash The Parties

2012 is emerging as another anti-incumbent election year. However, swinging back and forth between two parties won't bring the change voters seek.

Instead, it's time for the frustrated American electorate to dump our two-party system.

When I made this suggestion on a political panel discussion last summer, an established Washington political figure shouted, "Have you looked at Italy lately?"

Poor Italy. Whenever someone imagines multiple political parties in America, fingers point at Italy and their reputation for political dysfunction.

However, multi-party democracies are the norm, not the exception, around the world.
In fact, there are only five two-party democracies in the entire world.

Jamaica is one, the only nation to declare financial default in 2010. Another is Japan, which has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the world, standing at well over 200 percent. Are you seeing the pattern of fiscal trouble and two-party systems?

The Founding Fathers saw these problems coming and opposed a two-party democracy. George Washington warned against the system in his farewell address and John Adams took direct aim.

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." (Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1780), "The Works of John Adams", vol 9, p.511

It is a great irony that a country preaching freedom of choice offers only two real choices for our political participation.

If Americans were told to choose between two cars, shirts, colors or family sizes, we'd rise up in revolt against such Soviet dictates. Tell us we have only two parties, however, and we accept it as though any alternative is unimaginable.

The two parties don't reflect the views of our citizens. In their study, "Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology", the Pew Research Center identified nine distinct voter groups in America's 2012 election cycle. Both Republicans and Democrats continue to lose voter support as unaffiliated voters grow.

According to a May 9, 2011 Gallup Poll, as many as 52 percent of Republicans wished for a new party.

If everyone wants change, why can't we get it?

The problem is that our political class, funded by the same donors, controls the system that works for them. Though the two parties bicker and attack each other, they join forces in protecting their two-party monopoly.

Politicians won't lead us out of this system, but new social networking, with its revolutionary abilities, might.

Two political entrepreneurs, Nathan Daschle and Ray Glendening, have figured out how to harness it. They are launching Ruck.us this month as an online vehicle to reconnect American citizens to the issues we care about most.

Ruck.us will establish a forum where issues critical to our future as a nation can help us frame a new public discourse that goes beyond the typical smackdown for political majority status.

Members define their political DNA by answering a dynamic set of questions about their positions and issues. This process connects members with politically like-minded people, empowering them to take recommended collective actions both on and off the site.

By creating a political network, referred to as a ruck, members -- regardless of philosophy, ideology, or party affiliation -- receive an engaging experience that goes beyond being a Republican or Democrat.

Daschle describes it this way: "Ruck.us takes the core features of political engagement -- matching like-minded people, and then allowing them to exchange information and take collective action -- and rebuilds them. Political parties have held a monopoly on these features for the last 200 years. Thanks to social media technology, that's no longer the case."

Some will confuse this with failed efforts to create a third party, but Daschle sees it differently: "Third parties are doomed to fail because we have a winner-take-all system. It is not a third party. It's "anti-party." It challenges the deeper premise of whether parties are even necessary in the 21st century."

Like any innovation, the outcome isn't completely clear, but the opportunity to begin to change our political system is.

By undermining the hold of the old two-party system and fostering online communities focused on advancing political issues, we can create the opportunity to take our government back and give the American people the change the seek.

Rich Tafel is the CEO of Public Squared, which trains nonprofits in leadership and public policy. He serves on the Ruck.us advisory board and was the founder of Log Cabin Republicans and author of Party Crasher: A Gay Republican Challenges Politics as Usual.

 

Comments

[R Harvey]

07:22 PM on 09/21/2011

We have more than two parties, the issues is if you choose to belong to one of the parties that have only a single issue, you will be excluded from meaningful representation. It is really all about coallitions. The democracies that have multiple parties have elections and then strive to combine to create a majority. In the united states the major parties have within them the elements that would normally create the individual parties. Whether the factions like unions had their own party and had to unite with others to create a majority, it would be difficult to imagine them aligning themselves with conservatives. Equally true with the anti abortionists, the issues would however force a Catholic union member to choose, but s/he has to do that now.Vote their faith or their livelihood? Third parties are unlikely to work, unless given the time to mature, but then it would likely replace one of the existing major parties.

[Adam of CA]

02:07 PM on 09/21/2011

Rich Tafel can be counted among ten other reknowned journalist who are on the record that the DO NOTHING Congress has proven its uselessness.

Those same ten Talking Heads of major news web sites have all stated that the time is ripe to BURY the two-party system.
As recent as Sept. 16th, Fri., on PBS NewsHour, David Brooks of the NEW YORK TIMES quoted Charlie Cook who said that the voters are ready "to throw the bums out of both parties."

Mathew Dowd published in the HUFFINGTON POST last week that the Nov. 2012 Elections may be the "biggest political earthquake" in American political history. He too saw hints that the Mad-As-Hell voters will bury the two-party system.

Hope Mayor M. Bloomberg is also observing this voters' tsunami which should hit by early spring of 2012. It is then that the Mad-As-Hell voters will unite in revolt to bury the NO Republicans and the HELL NO Teapublicans at the Nov. 2012 Elections.

The Perfect Elections is on the horizon when the birth of an alternative party will return prosperity to all Americans. That Party should be named the, Peoples' Mandate.

[Mitchell Gilbert]

08:01 PM on 09/20/2011

Washington politics often seems as if the American Civil War never really ended. http://wp.me/p1Jt6N-7w /via @wordpressdotcom

[Countess]

12:49 PM on 09/20/2011

I agree with the fundanmental premise that two party system is the weakest form of democracy and forces people to vote for parties and people they can't even stand. It also has been a big factor in the evolution of a very corrupt system with the spoils being divided up between the two parties. Think of all the nonsense and phony fights the democrats and republicans engage in like the fight over health care. Bush and the republicans passed a prescription drug bill that subsidizes the rich companies and Obama and the democrats passed a health care reform bill that does the same for the insurance industry and yet democrats claim this as a great step forward and republicans have demonized it calling it Obamacare and a government takeover. Both points of view are ridiculous because both reforms are just ways of giving money to private industry at the expense of the public. If there actually was a real difference between the two parties the democrats would have at least proposed a real universal health care system like the rest of the industrialized world. Despite the heated rhetoric that will lead up to the next election the two parties have the same foreign policy and security policies and they have far more in common than they will ever admit.