The recent collapse of the bipartisan combined Ukraine aid/border security bill makes one thing clear: Those who engage in good-faith negotiations to find compromise solutions will be punished. Look no further than the Oklahoma GOP condemning Senator James Lankford for leading bipartisan talks.
The usual explanations for this are Donald Trump pressuring Republicans not to enact border policies when his presidential campaign depends on the failure of a coherent US border strategy or that bipartisanship has no place in an election year. While both are relevant, the core problem runs deeper. This troubling dysfunction is a symptom of the larger malady afflicting our politics: the two-party doom loop. The goal for too many of our representatives is no longer enacting legislation, finding common-sense solutions, or even trying to keep the government open or make sure the bills are paid. Instead, too many just want to “win” by “owning” the other side.
This zero-sum logic emerges from hyperpartisan US politics and the electoral system that made it possible — the system of winner-take-all elections. The US electoral system continues to amplify and reinforce divisions, feeding a tit-for-tat escalation of distrust, bad faith, and demonization.
The more divisive our politics, the more unproductive our policymaking. The more unproductive our policymaking, the more anger and frustration fuels more blame and division. Immigration and foreign policy are complicated subjects. They cross-cut the parties in ways that could facilitate creative, bipartisan dealmaking — and in an earlier time, they would have. But they are also high-profile issues.
Today, they lie trapped in no man’s land. In this environment, only low-salience issues that largely evade public attention stand a chance at productive, compromise-oriented resolution. For the crime of trying to find a compromise on an urgent but difficult issue like immigration, Oklahoma Republicans charged Lankford with “playing fast and loose” with Democrats on border policy, going so far as to warn him to “cease and desist jeopardizing the security and liberty of the people of Oklahoma.”
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The tragedy is not that Republicans and Democrats are unable to agree on these issues. They absolutely could — look no further than the bipartisan bill they put forward on Ukraine and border control. The policy disagreements between the parties on most issues are smaller than we’re led to believe. The tragedy is that the two parties don’t — or won’t — seek common ground, even though the deals are hiding in plain sight.
Unfortunately, the binary structure of the political conflict today — it’s always “us-versus-them” — has made fighting to win power more important than fighting to resolve disagreements. In an earlier era, we had something more like a four-party system, where liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats existed alongside conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, lending more fluidity to potential issue coalitions, and allowing Congress to do the hard work of assembling majorities around compromise solutions.
Today, rarely do these stars align. US politics has flattened from a flexible four-party system into a rigid two-party system, thanks to nationalization, sorting, and continued close-fought, knife’s-edge elections. According to one study, the United States features among the world’s strictest two-party systems — the only democracy, in fact, that did not see a single new major party emerge since the start of the 20th century. Making matters worse, an authoritarian faction has taken over one of the two parties.
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Our antiquated system of single-member, winner-take-all elections — if a candidate wins 51 percent of the vote, she wins 100 percent of the representation — is not up to the extraordinary challenges facing our nation today. The US electoral system needs a more modern system of representation — proportional representation, which elects multiple representatives in each district in proportion to the number of people who vote for them — to better represent both the diversity and pluralism of the nation and, more practically, to allow for more shifting coalitions that could find creative compromises on issues like immigration. Because proportional systems tend to create space for more parties — and more opportunities for fluid coalition-building across them — they are associated with less dangerous degrees of polarization and tend to be at a lesser risk of political violence. Unlike other changes that require constitutional amendments, American elections can switch to proportional representation through a simple statutory change.
By contrast, winner-take-all systems like the United States’ are associated with higher levels of polarization and a greater risk of political violence. Re-legalizing fusion voting — where multiple political parties can nominate the same candidate on the ballot — would also be a powerful step toward a multiparty democracy and would allow for a uniquely American version of proportional representation within the context of existing single-winner elections.
If the United States had a multiparty system, one could imagine that multiple parties near the center of the political spectrum would come together to forge and pass a compromise Ukraine/border policy bill.
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No doubt, there has been some notable progress on important issues even in our current system, such as the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act. Yet these legislative success stories are almost always in the form of large-scale domestic spending packages with enough sweeteners to win some bipartisan support and enough business lobbying heft to get it over the top.
But on other issues, particularly immigration and foreign policy (or Social Security, policing, etc.), the winning coalitions don’t map so neatly onto the interests of the leadership of either party. The bottom line is that unless the country does something to break the two-party doom loop — specifically by moving to a system of proportional representation by amending the Uniform Congressional District Act (the only statutory hurdle that stands in the way) — the United States will get exactly what it is getting now: escalating toxic partisan conflict with no resolution in sight.
Lee Drutman, author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” is a senior fellow at New America, cohost of the podcast Politics in Question, and cofounder of Fix Our House. Farbod Faraji leads structural reform efforts through policy and litigation at Protect Democracy.
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