Stuck on a Narrow Line

Toward a multi-party, multi-dimensional democracy

My political neighborhood is mixed. We call ourselves lefties, or liberals, or progressives, and disagree about what each term means. Nor is that all that we disagree on. I worry about falling birth rates; my friends still worry about overpopulation. My friend Lee, comfortable with trans and non-binary adults, is uneasy about hormone treatment for teens.  Another is passionate about returning land to Native Americans, but opposes reparations for Black Americans.

Something similar is true on the other side of town, among people who call themselves conservative.

Too many charts of  American political life ignore those complexities.  The familiar left-to-right line

suggests that we all belong someplace on its single dimension. The line suggests, for instance, that Chris, who favors fracking, is a little to the right of Eli, who does not. But Chris favors affirmative action, and Eli does not. The line can’t capture that complexity. It can’t, because there is no single principle tying together either the American left or the right. Commitments, for instance,  to gun control, unions, and abortion rights  are independent of one another.  Someone could fiercely defend the right to bear arms, and just as fiercely defend a woman’s right to choose. Someone else could oppose unions and embrace immigration. And so on.

What that line represents is not a unified ideology, but the current bundle of positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties. Each party’s platform is a tangle of commitments linked less by principle than by history and accident. And that’s why the one-dimensional line is useful: It captures our most basic political reality, that in most elections, only the Democrat and the Republican have any chance of winning.

Political scientists recognize the multiplicity hidden by the simple line. Lee Drutman, author ofBreaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, argues that Americans divide naturally not into two parties (with a sprinkling of tiny “third parties”), but into roughly six, each substantial, each with a distinctive cluster of positions.

His six parties don’t fit onto a simple line. Drutman uses instead a square, with two axes, one economic, the other social. The six parties are scattered around the box.

Drutman’s square, with its two dimensions, is much better at capturing the country’s array of political convictions. But the one-dimensional line captures the political reality that ordinarily only the two dominant parties — the left and right ends of the line — usually matter.

The line flattens our thinking

That all-too-familiar line flattens our thinking. In Drutman’s square, no party is in the center, because no one is centrist on everything. But on the one-dimensional line, someone who favored, say, both gun control and drilling in the Arctic -- someone who’s not centrist on either issue -- would find themselves in the center because they’re pulled toward both parties.

I was struck by this during a recent reunion with a childhood best friend. We talked for hours over several days. We had forged, in adulthood, different political allegiances.  She listened to mine (much more attentively, I now think, than I listened to hers). What struck me was that for her the word ‘liberal’ was roughly synonymous with ‘evil.’ A new proposal for land management?  Liberal. Vegetarianism?  Electric vehicles? All tainted by their association with what she considered a dangerous, intrinsically undesirable, political position.

Those of us on the left end do the same. A phrase like ‘individual responsibility’ recently silenced my book group, not because they reject the idea, but because the term is political code for Republican stances. Politics will always create slogans, but that one-dimensional line makes too many terms toxic to too many audiences.

The line narrows our choices

That line also narrows our choices. A few years ago I chatted with a neighbor who flies a MAGA flag. I noted that, and started to say, “I think Trump is evil, but I know you aren’t.” He interrupted me at the comma, muttering “I could almost agree on that.” Startled, I asked if he thought the 2020 election had been stolen. “Of course not,” he said in disgust. Then he straightened his shoulders: “But I’m a Republican.” Another friend mentioned hating Trump. “But I’m a conservative.”

Similar conflicts hold on the left. Sanders supporters, voting for Clinton in 2016, held their noses. This November I would have held my breath in voting for Biden.

There will always be voters who dislike the slate of candidates. (As I say before every election, God is once again not on the ballot.) But in a healthier polity we could choose, not from the lesser of two evils, but from the least imperfect of several candidates.

One caution: Until we moot or eliminate the Electoral College, we don’t want more than two strong candidates in presidential elections. Three or more could mean that no one receives an Electoral College majority. In that case, the election goes to the House, where each state gets a single vote. California one, Wyoming one: The Electoral College on steroids.

But there are so many other significant races. Congress matters. No president gets much done without its cooperation. Multiple parties there, and in state offices, would open possibilities for compromise. And, as I wrote recently, if the Senate were divided into three or more robust parties, Supreme Court nominees would also come, not from the ends of our one-dimensional line, but from various places inside Drutman’s box.

And so again I suggest ranked choice voting as a step toward a more reasonable politics. The blog DemocracySOS is dedicated to that proposition. In Michigan, a campaign toward putting the issue on the 2026 ballot is beginning this month. Check it out. 

Let’s add dimension to our politics.

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