How The Two Party System is Breaking Us Broke/Broken

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According to a recent CBS/YouGov study, 54 percent of U.S. adults believe the biggest threat to America's way of life is other people in the country and domestic enemies. We are living in an era in which our political affiliations define us and with whom we live, have relationships, and work. We think of those on the other side of the aisle as the “other” and our “enemy”. 
So, how did we get here?
Many argue that while there are many reasons for our current highly polarized state, our two-party structure is a significant contributor and sets us up to demonize those one the other side of the aisle. The system in which we conduct our democracy is set up to foment that demonization.
We spoke to Lee Drutman, fellow at New America and author of The Two Party Doom Loop: A Case for A Multiparty Democracy In America, to discuss how our two party system is breaking our country and contributing to our incredibly polarized state.
“It's important to understand that you don't have to be stuck in an abusive relationship with a voting system that doesn't work,”

Broke/Broken
All right, so here with me today is Lee Drutman. He's a fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America... So, Lee, thank you so much for being here today.
Lee Drutman
Oh, great to be having this conversation.
Broke/Broken
So in this newsletter, one of our goals is to kind of highlight where our systems are broken and why and possibly how we can fix those things for maybe a little slightly less broken America. So that's why we really wanted to talk to you about your book, because I think it's a perfect example about, you know, how structurally we're kind of set up for the things that we're seeing today, right? A very highly polarized society and all of that. So before we get into the weeds on your book and the case for a multiparty democracy, I wanted to get, you know, your kind of journey into what got you thinking about that in the first place, a multi-party system. And you know kind of how you came to the conclusion of that.
Lee Drutman
Sure. So my previous book was called The Business of America is Lobbying, which is a book about corporate influence in our politics. And in researching and writing a book, I came to understand that one reason why corporate lobbyists seem to have so much influence in Washington was because Congress had hollowed out or hollowed out its own expertise and had basically given itself a lobotomy and outsourced policymaking largely to corporate lobbyists. And the same problem to me. So I set about thinking about what would be the logical way to fix that problem. And it was somewhat obvious Congress could just invest more in its own staff capacity and its own expertise, as it had in an earlier era. And this was something that seemed so obvious that everybody agreed with me. But it didn't happen and I tried to understand what it was that was preventing Congress from doing this and came to appreciate how much this was a function of a highly polarized Congress and highly centralized two party Congress, that, you know, there wasn't really an appetite for expertise because Congress had become a battlefield, not a policymaking space, and I’m a big believer in Congress and legislatures as essential places where representative democracy happens. And, you know, if you're going to have a diverse, pluralistic society, you need an institution where that diversity and pluralism can kind of work out its disagreements. And that just wasn't happening in Congress. So the problem was really deeper than expertise; it was that our party system had become deeply hyper-partisan. And we have these institutions that are set up to require broad compromise and make narrow, simple majoritarianism very difficult to navigate. And yet we have electoral institutions that are now pushing us very much towards simple majoritarianism. And this is in many ways a