Like a horse that’s always worn blinders, Americans are unaware of their narrow field of political vision. The plethora of political parties in most Western parliamentary democracies spans the ideological spectrum, while our own view of the political extremes – from far-right Republicans to far-left Democrats – occupies only an attenuated segment near the middle.
And we like it that way. If and when the phenomenon is noted, we take it as an affirmation of American common sense and commitment to liberty. In what we see as yet another example of American exceptionalism, we stridently disagree among ourselves on many issues, but do so in an arena absent the strange, outlier parties that make foreign democracies feel so, well, foreign to us.
Only we’re not so exceptional after all. Indeed, the broader meaning of the 2016 electoral mystery tour is that we’ve become, in effect, a four-party system expanding across a broader swath of the political spectrum and, in doing so, bearing an closer resemblance to many of the parliamentary systems that mystify us.
Inside the Republican party, we now see a classic, right-wing entry in parliamentary systems: a nationalist party that blames the country’s economic woes on immigrants and minorities, seeks to roll back the expansion of rights of these and other vulnerable groups, and is catalyzed by a charismatic, authoritarian leader willing to ignore the legal obstacles that stand in the way of restoring the empire to greatness. History, of course, has warned us over and over again what can happen when this group rides a wave of xenophobia to power.
As we are coming to recognize, the American version of the nationalist party consists largely of culturally conservative, recession-scarred, white working-class men. The wealthy Republican establishment had managed, over time, to keep this group – with whom it had little organic connection – in tow by promising trickle-down prosperity and lip-syncing conservative positions on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and immigration.
With the arrival of Donald Trump on the scene and the realization that not a drop of the wealth concentrated at the top had trickled anywhere, the nationalist party-within-a-party has been busy rejecting the establishment’s gaggle of presidential candidates funded by corporations and wealthy donors. In turn, the old guard’s reluctance to push for their party’s presumptive nominee is a measure of both the unbridgeable gap between the old and new parties on the right and the common, primal commitment of the Republican and Democratic establishments to a corporate-funded electoral system. Better to lose the next election than one’s basis of power.
Within the Democratic party, we see the formation of another universal parliamentary party – the social democrats – who accept the legitimacy or inevitability of capitalism, see the universal provision of fundamental services as a right, press for robust market and product regulation, oppose a concentration of wealth at the top, and favor the continued expansion of the rights of vulnerable groups. The ideological divide between the party establishment and democratic socialists – tired of establishment claims of standing up to the very interests that fund Democratic office holders’ campaigns – is vast and insurmountable, and Hillary Clinton’s fears that Sander’s supporters won’t return to the party fold in November underscores the point.
Our two parties-within-a-party may not emerge as independent entities anytime soon, however. Unlike parliamentary systems, where the body of popularly elected representatives jockey to form a coalition government and appoint the nation’s chief executive, the Founding Fathers directed us to elect our chief executive via a majority of Electoral College electors. The existence of a strong third party, much less a forth one, would severely reduce the chance that any of the parties’ candidates would receive a majority. Accordingly, the de facto parties may – as in this election cycle – quadrennially conduct a civil war over the presidential nominee and the selection process within the confines of the existing parties.
If and when the nationalist and social democratic constituencies emerge as independent parties and no presidential candidate garners majority of electors, then – as we learned in civics class – the task of choosing a president would befall the House of Representatives, where our four parties would dicker to form a coalition able to select a president and advance the coalition’s legislative agenda. And, in doing so, we’d bear an even closer family resemblance those foreign parliamentary systems we now find so strange.