Politics as practiced in the United States broadly has the character of team sports in which Democratic and Republican voters show concern more for the letter that appears in parentheses after a politician’s name than about policy.This claim will shock many readers on the first pass, but consider the attitudes found in promotions of #MAGA, despite its nebulous definitions that depended on whatever Trump might say from minute to minute, or in the insistence that we #VoteBlueNoMatterWho, a demand that is structurally one that a devoted Cubs fan could make. We divide the nation into red states and blue states, creating the expectation both among residents and among people from other parts of the country that I as someone who lives in Arkansas must be a Trump supporter or that a voter in New York has to agree entirely with Nancy Pelosi, despite the latter’s representation of a district on the opposite coast of the continent. As I will suggest below, something of this approach to a country’s governance is to be expected, but we go astray when we lose a clear sense of the point of the exercise.
This is nothing new and not uniquely American. In the case of the NikaRiots in the early years of Emperor Justinian, sports and politics took on an interchangeable character, and it is possible to consider Alcibiades, the sometimes Athenian politician and general, in the manner of a quarterback, moving from team to team in search of a better contract as the Peloponnesian War played itself out. The framers of the American constitution saw this as one of the greatest risks to our new republic. The authors of the Federalist Papers, for example—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and briefly John Jay—agonized over what would happen if factions—one way that they described parties—took hold precisely because they understood how joining up in teams has the effect of splitting a society into pieces.
The unfortunate consequence of their anxiety was to build into our system a failure to recognize the inevitable. A gregarious species isgoing to form tribes, and though I have taken something of a disparaging tone toward the nature of parties, at the same time, I have to acknowledge that combining together for a common purpose is an effective way of getting things done. But if we are to have functioning politics, the tension between the individual and the collective—between each participant and the teams that we join—cannot be resolved. Individualism without a sense ofobligation is anarchy, and collectivism for its own sake is either tyranny or vacuity.
This is not to say that alternatives do not exist—though accusations made by Howie Hawkins with regard to the Democratic Party’s efforts to keep the Green Party off ballots illustrate the difficulties involved—but that instead an observation about what is the modal behavior in American politics. Thinking outside the two-party boxes requires dedicated and contrarian effort on the part of the individual, an action that, to appropriate the words of Spinoza, is as difficult as it is rare.
I am not suggesting by what I have said here that politics is devoid of any real content. It is instead a recognition that there is a strong tendency to support my party, right or wrong, much as fandom in sports works. There is a force in political affiliation that pushes supporters into greater conformity with the party’s doctrines. The dulling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's leftism as she has worked to become acceptable to the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives is but the latest lamentable illustration of this. And this force in politics, what I would call its original sin, paints the team colors over the blemishes of bad programs, turning anyone who raises objections into a traitor to the group, instead of a person who offers necessary challenges to test the system.
How, then, can we have meaningful parties—parties that preserve an understanding that the point of politics is responsive government for all?
One answer is competition. In the same way that concentrations of market share into the control of a handful of corporations is bad for the economy, the two-party system that most Americans have accepted as simply the way things are no longer works for the country.
When I say this, the inevitable reaction, often from Democrats who feel the most threatened by this, is that new parties cannot win, thanks to a lack of organization and cash and to the structure of our electoral system. But this is only wishful thinking on the part of the party establishment. The Republican Party was itself a kind of third party, building on the discontent Whigs and peeling away anti-slavery advocates in whatever affiliations they were to be found in the1850s. In more recent elections, Ross Perot got nineteen percent of the vote, despite having dropped out and then rejoined the race and having picked a running mate who gave no one confidence in his ability to govern. And while Donald Trump proved to have no coherent program, it is instructive to note that his candidacy in 2016 was essentially athird-party run.
That latter point reminds me that both the Democrats and the Republicanshave reinvented themselves throughout our history, suggesting another route, namely something akin to what William F. Buckley, Jr. and others did to the GOP, an effort to pull the party toward nationalism and economic libertarianism starting in the 50s and continuing to the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. I am less encouraged by this route, as it takes a long time, but it does take advantage of the extant party machinery.
However, the crises that the world and the country face today are many, with at least one, climate change, being existential. As someone on the left, I may be accused of not taking seriously the concerns of the right wing in the latter half of the twentieth century, though the possibility of hundreds of millions of persons displaced by rising sea levels and crop lands turning into deserts with millions lacking adequate healthcare or access to education here at home strikes me as being of a different order of magnitude. In any case, transforming established political parties and building new ones need not be seen as mutually exclusive, given the number of voters and political activists available.
Can working on the outside of the major parties achieve anything meaningful? Ross Perot’s campaign earned him no electoral votes, but he taught future politicians how to reach voters without having to pass through the traditional filters, and he made the economic concerns of the working class a key consideration in the 1992 election. Would that Bernie Sanders could achieve the same result today, as opposed merely to shifting the rhetoric of the Democrats. What I conclude from having watched the three insurgents—Perot, Sanders, and Trump—among others is that a candidate who figures out how to appeal directly to voters without asking a party’s permission can build sufficient support to be a threat to the establishment. Such candidates who combine the team sports nature of populism with a platform that would achieve actual good have a decent chance of winning.
In our current electoral system, thirty-three percent plus one vote is in many cases all that is required to achieve office. This is true about electoral college votes, and even if races for House or Senate seats result in a runoff if no candidate clears fifty percent the first time, the chances that someone with a distinctive platform would survive to the second round are high.
But is this not the team sports that troubled me at the start of this essay? As I said, combining in groups is inevitable, and both politics and sports are a less bloody way of continuing war by other means. The question again is the objective. If my review of Democratic attitudes on social media is an accurate representation of the party’s views, the goal of such voters was only to score a win for their team—thus the praise heaped upon Biden’s first hundred days in the presidency, despite his having done little that would make that time stand out from the George W. Bush administration or from any other with the exception of Trump’s in the last three decades. And the lesson that I draw from having watched politics for forty years and read the political history of the twentieth century is that when Democrats work for big progressive goals, they win. In those times that they only push a small-bore agenda, they lose: Congress, certainly, and the presidency soon enough.
Are enough voters willing to break away? If the conclusion of the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth is correct, not so many are needed. As with sports, so with politics in that an appealing team will have many fans, supporters who are not themselves players. The left has made gains among the electorate in recent years. It is time for us to build on that movement—within the Democratic Party if possible, outside it if necessary—to translate increased attention into policy achievements. Finally, my argument is that it is time for progressives to expand the league, to take advantage of the sporting character of politics to get good policy enacted. Combining together for the good of us all is the central justification for government that has been made since the days of Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and his disciples among America’s early leaders. The seats around the arena are filled with many Americans in need and in readiness for progress.