I agree with Jamelle's criticisms of Tom Friedman's widely and justly mocked column calling for a third party that coincidentally agrees with Tom Friedman about everything. This kind of longing for a party that allegedly transcends politics is indeed anti-democratic. Just to pile on, it's also worth noting that Friedman's third-party solution doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Among its other flaws, Friedman's argument illustrates a classic pathology of the American pundit class: an unwillingness to consider that the roots for some political problems might be found in the United States Constitution itself. Here's Freidman's diagnosis of the nation's current political ills:
But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn't deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions.
The obvious problem here is that Friedman's complaints don't describe temporary anomalies that are the result of two "bankrupt" parties. Rather, they involve things that are endemic to the American political system. There is, to put it mildly, nothing new about regulatory regimes delegating power to the executive branch through vague legislation, even during periods of unusually unified federal government or legislative innovation. The new financial-regulation bill is a model of clarity compared to the Sherman Antitrust Act, and a lot of early New Deal legislation was so vague that even staunch liberals on the Supreme Court thought it constituted an illegal delegation of congressional authority. Nor is there anything unusual about the compromises that marred the Affordable Care Act. In terms of "suboptimal" legislative sausage-making, it's hard to top the pervasive discrimination against African Americans that was built into virtually every major New Deal program. Evasions of responsibility and compromises with venal legislative blocs aren't some modern exception to American politics -- they're the rule. They're an inevitable outcome of the incentives created by the separation of powers and the proliferation of veto points.
And what's even worse about about Friedman's argument is that an expanded party system would, if anything, make the problem worse. There would be real virtues to, say, instituting a proportional representation system that would make multiple strong parties possible. But having to put together new coalitions on every issue would, if anything, make vague legislation and special-interest influence more of a problem. To the extent that one agrees with Freidman's critique of the current American political climate, what's needed is institutional reform, not some mythical Broder for Connecticut for Lieberman Unity Party to come save us.
-- Scott Lemieux
