Lee Drutman has an essay in The NY Times today asking if there’s a better way to organize political leanings in America outside of the default two choices.
* see the link at the bottom of this post to get past the paywall.
The quiz is 20 questions. Each has a statement with a choice of 5 answers:
Strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, neutral, somewhat agree, strongly agree.
Once completing the quiz, the essay uses the answers to sort into six different 'parties': Patriot Party, Christian Conservative Party, Growth & Opportunity Party, New Liberal Party, American Labor Party, and Progressive Party. What makes it especially interesting is how the parties are displayed. The are placed on a grid with an X axis running from economically liberal to economically conservative, and a Y axis running from socially liberal to more socially conservative.
There are any number of criteria pairs that could be used to sort political leanings to give an idea of how they relate to each other. (The Pournelle axes for example sort by attitude towards the State and embrace of Reason.) Drutman has picked these criteria because:
Each party represents a different portion of the electorate, not only ideologically but also by economic class and political engagement.
There is no “center” party here. That is because there are very few voters in the middle across all issues. Many readers who consider themselves centrist might also think of themselves as socially liberal/fiscally moderate or socially moderate/fiscally conservative. They will find a home in either the New Liberal Party or the Growth and Opportunity Party.
These six parties reflect the underlying factions — and divides — within the Democratic and Republican parties. Until American politics nationalized in the 1980s and 1990s around divisive culture-war issues, they operated more independently within the two major political parties.
Here’s how Drutman describes each party:
The Patriot Party is the party of Donald Trump’s 2016 primary campaign: the coalition of the small town, white working-class Americans who feel left behind by globalism and condescended to by cosmopolitanism. It is economically populist and strongly anti-immigration. Its strongest support among lower-income conservatives comes from exurban America.
Its potential leaders include Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Tucker Carlson. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 14 percent of the electorate.
The Christian Conservative Party is focused centrally on issues of religious liberty and morality, with very limited government. It will find stronger support among the most politically engaged and affluent, especially men.
Its potential leaders include Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott and Mike Pompeo. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 20 percent of the electorate.
The Growth and Opportunity Party is the socially moderate, pro-business wing of the Republican Party. It is the heir to the old moderate “Rockefeller Republican,” the East Coast wing of the G.O.P.
Its potential leaders include Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Mitt Romney, John Kasich and Michael Bloomberg. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 14 percent of the electorate.
The New Liberal Party is the professional-class establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Members are cosmopolitan in their social and racial views but more pro-business and more likely to see the wealthy as innovators.
Its potential leaders include Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Eric Garcetti and Beto O’Rourke. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 26 percent of the electorate.
The American Labor Party is focused on economic populism, with an appeal to working-class Democrats who don’t have college degrees and don’t follow politics closely. It is more moderate on social and cultural issues compared with the Progressive Party, but also more diverse, appealing to many working-class Hispanics.
Its potential leaders include Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester and Tim Ryan. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 12 percent of the electorate.
The Progressive Party is focused on equity and racial justice, with a strong vision of inclusive social democracy. Its strongest support comes from politically engaged, highly educated younger people, especially women.
Its potential leaders include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren or Julián Castro. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 14 percent of the electorate.
The idea of dividing up America (or any other country) in terms of Left versus Right is problematic because it’s too simplistic and based on historical criteria that no longer apply. According to Pournelle,
The notion of a "left" and a "right" has been with us a long time. It originated in the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly during their revolution. The delegates marched into the Hall of Machines by traditional precedence, with the aristocrats and clergy entering first, then the wealthier bourgeois, and so on, with the aristocracy seated on the Speaker's right. Since the desire for radical change was pretty well inversely proportionate to wealth, there really was, for a short time, a legitimate political spectrum running from right to left, and the concept of left and right made sense.
Within a year it was invalidated by events. New alliances were formed. Those who wanted no revolutionary changes at all were expelled (or executed). There came a new alignment called "The Mountain" (from their habit of sitting together in the higher tiers of seats). Even for 18th Century France the "left-right" model ceased to have any theoretical validity.
Yet it is with us yet; and it produces political absurdities. No one can possibly define what variable underlies the "left-right" continuum today. Is it "satisfaction with existing affairs?" Then why are reactionaries, who most definitely want fundamental changes in the system, called "right wing"? Worse, the left-right model puts Fascism and Communism at opposite end-- yet those two have many similarities. Both reject personal freedom. Some would say they are more similar than different.
What are we to make of Objectivists and the radical libertarians? They've been called "right wing anarchists," which is plain silly, a total contradiction in terms.
Drutman argues that breaking up our existing two parties along the lines suggested above would have several benefits: higher voter turn out, more policy alternatives than the 2 party system allows, and reinvigoration of our current government. But — how to put it in practice?
We get to such a system through proportional multimember districts. This approach features districts much larger than our current tiny congressional ones — and each elects more than one person, at once, to represent the region. So more than one party could represent a district in proportion to their popularity within that large district — just as they do in most advanced democracies.
Legislation introduced in the current Congress, the Fair Representation Act, would require use of multimember districts with ranked-choice voting in most states’ House selections as well as elections for the Senate. If more parties emerged, coalitions across parties would form to elect a speaker and organize committee assignments — just as coalitions form in multiparty legislatures around the world. Multiparty democracy would facilitate the shifting alliances and bargaining that are essential in democracy but have largely disappeared in today’s zero-sum conflict.
emphasis added
An additional aspect of larger multi-member districts is that it would make gerrymandering far less viable as a political tactic. Drutman also points out an interesting historical datum:
No constitutional amendment is needed to enact this reform. Article I, Section IV of the Constitution gives Congress wide latitude to write congressional election rules. And in fact, multimember congressional districts were used commonly in the first half of the 19th century until Congress passed legislation banning them.
emphasis added — historical details here.
Absent reform of the electoral college, Drutman expects Presidential races would still be binary contests, but the other changes would have a large effect on the way the Senate and the House would operate. It would be interesting to see how it would work out if applied at the state level as well. What it would do for the power of money in our politics is less certain, or how it would affect judicial nominations. It would also make cabinet picks more fraught.
All of that plus the problem of getting past the way the two parties we allow ourselves is no small obstacle. America has had a hard enough time entertaining third party efforts, let alone going to a half-dozen…
Eric Boehlert discusses the way the media reflexively splits the political divide 50-50, even though it’s not the case. Tom Sullivan over at Digby’s Place looks at what Boehlert is discussing, and observes that Progressives now have the prospect of having to act as a legitimate mainstream element of the Democratic Party, like it or not.
Read the whole thing. (If I read the instructions correctly, this link should get people past the paywall.) Drutman has much more analysis breaking down how these multi-parties would overlap and interact. It’s much food for thought.
UPDATE:
Reading through the comments I see a number of similar observations that might benefit from some further elucidation. Let me take a shot at it — starting with the paywall issue. To repeat:
Read the whole thing. (If I read the instructions correctly, this link should get people past the paywall.)
1) Some are asking why socialists, greens, anarcho-syndicalists, etc. are not showing up on the plot. As I understand it, this is an exercise in splitting up the Republican and Democratic Parties — not an all-inclusive amalgamation. It’s working along dividing lines within the two parties.
2) Some are asking why environmentalism/climate change is not getting much if any attention here. Drutman is working from what he decided were the two primary dividing lines in American politics today: how economically conservative someone is combined with how socially conservative they are — two coordinates to plot position on a two dimensional graph. Adding more criteria would require adding more dimensions.
3) Another way of thinking about this is that it is about dividing up along the lines of money power and culture war issues. This could be taken as evidence that Republicans have largely been setting the rules of engagement for the last few decades. See point 2 above.
4) Some found a few of the questions irrelevant to their leanings, or thought there should have been more issue-oriented questions. This quiz is more about attitudes than specific views on specific issues, for placement on the axes. Not all questions are going to be relevant to all of the six parties.
5) Progressives placed at the lower left corner — in effect no other group in the two parties is less conservative about economic and social matters. That doesn’t show the views of those outside the parties. Note also that no one is more socially conservative than the Christian Conservatives — within the limits of the plot.
6) The paucity of entries in the upper left quadrant suggests that no one in either party is conservative about social matters without also being conservative about economic matters. Again, this is the view from 10,000 feet so to speak, but it’s also the result of mapping quiz results to align them with the 6 parties as sorted by Drutman’s criteria.
7) If you look at the article, it shows first how a group of nearly 5,000 quiz takers plotted against the axes; all four quadrants have occupants. It’s only after they filtered them into hypothetical parties according to the two criteria that it appears to leave the quadrant empty.
8) A number of commenters have noted they ended up between parties — which is not surprising as someone would have to answer every question in a way that lined up with particular party criteria to land exactly on it. As an exercise, try taking the quiz again with different answers and see how that affects where you end up.
9) Keep in mind that this is based on Drutman’s work; others may have different ways to address this. To quote from the Times, “This essay is part of a series exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment. Read more about this project in a note from Ezekiel Kweku, Opinion’s politics editor.
Lee Drutman (@leedrutman), a senior fellow at New America, is the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and a co-founder of Fix Our House, a new campaign for proportional representation.