The latest This Old Democracy podcast features political scientist Lisa Disch on the artificial roots of two-party rule, the buried history of multi-party democracy in the US and a credible strategy for creating a better party system. If you've ever felt trapped by a disagreeable, binary choice at the ballot box — known in elite political science circles as the "hold your nose" vote — Lisa Disch wants you to know that feeling isn't a personal failing. It's a structural condition, and not a natural one. It didn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to stay this way. Disch, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, joins host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy for a wide-ranging conversation about the rules, myths, and suppressed history behind America's duopoly. The result is an illuminating conversation — essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what's broken about our politics, but how it got this way, and what we can do about it. Disch opens with a provocation: she would ban the very phrase "two-party system" if she could. Not because two parties don't dominate American politics — they obviously do — but because calling it a "system" implies something organic, inevitable, and permanent. It's none of those things. "Most people in the US accept third party failure as a matter of course. They feel that third party candidacies put them in a terrible position — in the grips of a terrible dilemma. Do I vote for a candidate who might represent me better, but may end up throwing the election to the candidate whom I, and actually most people, least prefer? And we assume that this is just a natural feature of the two-party system. And we don't think about the institutions that make this game so stacked against third political parties." That's not a description of nature. It's a description of rules — rules that were deliberately designed, largely at the turn of the 20th century, to choke off the extraordinary multi-party vitality that had characterized American democracy for most of the 1800s. The history Disch tells is one familiar to regular readers of this Substack, but unfamiliar to most Americans. Before the adoption of the government-printed "Australian ballot" in the 1890s, parties printed their own ballots, and fusion candidacies — where a single candidate could and did appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — were common and powerful. They allowed third parties to build real coalitions, elect real officeholders, and sustain real organizations. Then came a two-step trap. First, states adopted ballot access thresholds that made it costly and difficult for minor parties to qualify. Then — and this is the critical piece — some states quietly banned fusion by requiring that no candidate could be nominated by more than one party. The effect was devastating: "What this meant was that partisans of one party would not vote for the candidate that looked like it was the candidate of the other party... populist voters [would say], 'I'm not voting for the Democratic party. They're a terrible party. They supported slavery. Why would I do that? I'm going to lose votes.'" A populist organizer of the era saw it coming with brutal clarity, as Disch quotes: "Whenever a fusion candidate running under the Democratic heading alone produced many stay-at-home votes – that is to say abstainers – in the future, we populists will have to get on the ballot by petition." They understood exactly how the new rules would hollow out their organizations. And they were right. "This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for third political parties to have any lasting presence in US elections — because you spend an enormous amount of resources just getting on the ballot." The near-destruction of fusion voting didn't just limit ballot options. It destroyed something more fundamental: the capacity of ordinary people to build durable political organizations that could teach civic skills, develop political identities, and force new issues onto the national agenda. "Party organizations are incredibly useful because they teach voters civic skills and give them a commitment to participation that does not revolve around a charismatic person." This is why, Disch argues, 20th-century third-party efforts so often collapsed into personality vehicles — Perot, Nader, Stein — rather than sustained movements. Without the rules that enable organization-building, third parties become flashes in the pan. And flash-in-the-pan politics, as Micah Sifry noted in his own earlier writing (which Disch quotes back to him), leaves us with "chronic explosions of anti-incumbent sentiment and independent celebrity bids for office as the only alternatives to the duopoly." So far this is familiar stuff to most readers. But then Disch explains the deeper damage, far beyond electoral mechanics, that is all-too-familiar to American voters and organizers. "The two-party system we have today is giving us what political scientists like to call one-dimensional conflict. And that describes a conflict in which it can only be zero-sum because if you win, I lose, and in which I see you in very narrow terms. I assume that we disagree on everything. So all my beliefs fall in one line and all of your beliefs fall in one line." A multi-party system, by contrast, offers a more nuanced picture of political reality — one where people's beliefs don't have to be sorted into two pre-packaged bundles, and where coalitions can form around specific issues rather than tribal identities. One of the most striking moments in the podcast conversation comes when Sifry asks what happens when readers and students first encounter "buried history" — in this case, when they learn that the Constitution says nothing about political parties at all: that for most of the 19th century formidable third parties succeeded one another with what historian John Davis, in 1933, called "bewildering rapidity:" and that the United States is the only democracy in the world in which a major new party did not emerge in the entire 20th century. Buried history, says Disch, produces first surprise — and then a sense of possibility. "They think that the two-party system has always been what it is now. And anytime you realize that something wasn't always what it is now, and that what it is was the product of decisions that people made, then you know that, well, those could be changed." Perhaps the most inspiring part of the conversation is Disch's account of the abolitionist third parties of the mid-19th century — the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers, and eventually the Republicans. These weren't just moral crusaders; they were sophisticated political strategists who understood that you can't change what people fight about without first building the organizations to fight differently. "For slavery to become a political fight, the abolitionist parties had to make it so — because both the Whigs and the Democrats were economically and politically rooted in the institution of enslavement in the same way that both of our political parties today are rooted in the economy of fossil fuel." The Liberty Party made a deliberate choice: it would be a political abolitionist party, not just a moral one. That meant building a coalition not of people who all agreed on the deep moral wrongness of slavery, but of people who could agree that enslavement was an attack on democracy itself — and that it threatened the freedom of white citizens alongside enslaved ones. It was a big-tent strategy in the service of a radical goal. "They not only built a coalition with people that they didn't fully agree with... It wasn't 'you're either in or you're out.' It was 'I bet we've got an argument for you that might bring you in.' And then they shifted the line — or they drew a line of conflict that didn't exist before." What made all of this possible - all of it - was fusion voting, which allowed these emerging parties to ally with sympathetic politicians from within the major parties as they grew. Without that flexibility, none of it could have happened. At the close of the conversation, Sifry asked the question he puts to every guest: in the face of what feels like the gravest threat to American democracy in living memory, what gives you hope? Disch draws from two wells. One is her students at the University of Michigan, whose engagement and seriousness move her. The other is her work as an Ann Arbor City Council member, where she's seen residents vote to tax themselves to fund affordable housing and carbon-free infrastructure — doing, as she puts it, "the boring, dirty, hard, slow work." That combination — engaged young people and vibrant local democracy — is, Disch suggests, where the seeds of a different kind of politics might take root. Maybe, someday, with better rules, those seeds could grow into something more.
