Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

America's two-party system is failing us

Red elephants and blue donkeys
Carol Yepes

Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.

Are Kamala Harris and Donald Trump really the two best candidates for America's most demanding and important job? Hardly. Trump tried to reverse the last election. And while Harris would be a reversion toward the mean — after an unfit Trump and an aging Joe Biden — she's far from the most talented executive in the country.

So why, then, are they the two candidates to be president?

The answer is America's two-party political system. While third parties occasionally make some noise, they never threaten the Democratic-Republican duopoly.


It’s just as America's founders feared. George Washington warned against having only two political parties: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” According to Washington, rival political parties “serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.” John Adams, for his part, considered a two-party system a grave threat to the republic: “a division of the republic into two great parties ... is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Indeed, the fewer tribes there are, the worse tribalism gets. And in America the two political tribes battle each other — and only each other — every single day. This rivalry amplifies bias, distorts the political debate, shunts policy platforms, stifles compromise and negotiation, and leads to subpar and underqualified government officials.

A deeply backward approach now dominates American politics: hating the other side even more than you like your own. An October 2020 study published in Science Magazine titled “Political Sectarianism in America,” highlighted this new paradigm: “Democrats and Republicans — the 85% of U.S. citizens who do not identify as pure independents — have grown more contemptuous of opposing partisans for decades, and at similar rates.” Recently, the study continued, “this aversion exceeded their affection for copartisans.”

This explains a lot. When you hate Trump viscerally it makes his opponent, Harris, seem like a better candidate than she really is. And vice versa.

The problem created by having only two political parties has been getting worse. Lee Drutman, the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” explained in 2020 that although “America’s two-party system goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms. Until then the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty democracy could work inside the two-party system. No more.”

A more diverse set of political parties would help. It would invigorate mainstream political discourse with additional points of view, as today many important ideas don’t make it onto the platforms of either side. The introduction of new ideas and coalitions would reduce rigid partisanship and provide incentives for politicians to respect empirical reality and not just reflexively appease their constituencies. As Drutman put it, a multiparty system would be “more fluid and responsive to Americans’ political preferences” and help “dissolve our binary partisanship.”

Additional political parties wouldn’t solve everything, to be sure. The new parties’ specific platforms would be key. There would likely still be gridlock in Congress. Tribalism and social-media echo chambers wouldn’t disappear. And other defects in the political system would remain.

But a vibrant multiparty system would directly address the biggest problem in U.S. politics: tribal rivalry and irrational partisanship. This more rational and diverse political system would make elections more about individual merit and less about party loyalty. And it would likely generate talented presidential candidates who are the most qualified for the job. A far cry from what we have now.

Read More

Defining the Democracy Movement: Richard Young
- YouTube

Defining the Democracy Movement: Richard Young

The Fulcrum presents The Path Forward: Defining the Democracy Reform Movement. Scott Warren's weekly interviews engage diverse thought leaders to elevate the conversation about building a thriving and healthy democratic republic that fulfills its potential as a national social and political game-changer. This series is the start of focused collaborations and dialogue led by The Bridge Alliance and The Fulcrum teams to help the movement find a path forward.

The most recent interview of this series took place with Richard Young, the Executive Director of CivicLex, a nonprofit organization strengthening civic health in Lexington, Kentucky. In addition to leading important work in Lexington, Richard has become an evangelist for the importance of place-based democracy work, which has indisputably gained interest and attention following the 2024 general election.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

An illustration of hands putting together a puzzle.

Getty Images, cienpies

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

The concept of the common good in American society has undergone a remarkable transformation since the nation's founding. What began as a clear, if contested, vision of collective welfare has splintered into something far more complex and individualistic. This shift reflects changing times and a fundamental reimagining of what we owe each other as citizens and human beings.

The nation’s progenitors wrestled with this very question. They drew heavily from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the social contract as a sacred covenant between citizens and their government. But they also pulled from deeper wells—the Puritan concept of the covenant community, the classical Republican tradition of civic virtue, and the Christian ideal of serving one's neighbor. These threads wove into something uniquely American: a vision of the common good that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.

Keep ReadingShow less
Building Bridges, Not Barriers: Civic Virtue in Divisive Times

Two people building a bridge out of blocks.

Getty Images, Liudmila Chernetska

Building Bridges, Not Barriers: Civic Virtue in Divisive Times

"The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor." Jonathan Haidt

What I’m about to share won’t be filled with data or empirical evidence to convince you.

Keep ReadingShow less
Defining the Democracy Movement: Stephen Richer
- YouTube

Defining the Democracy Movement: Stephen Richer

The Fulcrum presents The Path Forward: Defining the Democracy Reform Movement. Scott Warren's weekly interviews engage diverse thought leaders to elevate the conversation about building a thriving and healthy democratic republic that fulfills its potential as a national social and political game-changer. This series is the start of focused collaborations and dialogue led by The Bridge Alliance and The Fulcrum teams to help the movement find a path forward.

Stephen Richer is the former Recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, and a current Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center at Harvard University.

Keep ReadingShow less