“The Impotent American Voter” by Richard Winger and some related essays in the November 1994 issue—such as Jeffrey Tucker’s on the third-party option—are seriously wrong. I would hate to see Chronicles get a reputation for political kookiness based on a poor understanding of American politics.

Winger confuses political openness with openness to third parties. One of the reasons why third parties have fallen into marginality is that the two major parties are so permeable to significant new social forces. Their very organization, incorporated into state law, makes them highly vulnerable to new political impulses. Whether you are an environmentalist or a religious fundamentalist, getting a piece of the party action is relatively simple—perhaps too simple. You can offer your candidates in the primary, create a parallel organization, or run for party office. This happens all the time, and is responsible for both major parties being incoherent coalitions rather than European-style cadre parties with well-defined views. The “Golden Era” of American third parties was effectively destroyed by the primary system—why campaign as a Socialist in the winner-take-all system when you can capture the Democratic Party in the primary? The minor parties of old are now part of the major parties to the extent that they represent a significant electoral interest.

What Winger seems to be dreaming of is a system of multiparty proportional representation. This would, in short, be a disaster for America, producing a politics of passion and divisiveness. Forcing ideological differences into two parties does produce an inelegant mushiness, but there is much to recommend this “muddling along” in a nation with many deep political divisions. The left has long been interested in a multiparty system, given its infatuation with ideological purity, but why would Chronicles, with its distaste for “multiculturalism” and other group-based partitions of civic life, look so kindly on such a scheme?

        —Robert Weissberg
Department of Political Science
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL

Richard Winger Replies:

What I discussed in my article is a return to the U.S. ballot access laws of the 1910’s and 1920’s. I was not and am not advocating proportional representation.

During the 1910’s, five parties were represented in Congress and in many state legislatures: Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Progressives, and Prohibitionists. This was good for the country, because dissident political minorities felt that at least they had a spokesman in Congress and in state legislatures. Surely Professor Weissberg wouldn’t argue that American politics during the 1910’s were a “disaster.”

The decline of third parties in the United States was caused by the start of primaries. However, the system isn’t as open to that technique as he seems to think. State Democratic and Republican conventions, not primaries, choose nominees outright (if they wish) in Virginia; and no one may run in primaries without first gaining substantial support at a state party convention in Utah, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Dakota. This trend is strengthening. Last year the Hawaii State Supreme Court said that a party may prevent someone from running in its own primary if the major party leadership does not think the candidate is a bona fide supporter of the party. Courts in Alabama and Georgia have ruled that the Democratic Party may exclude Lyndon LaRouche supporters from Democratic primary ballots. The Supreme Court has consistently said that political parties have a First Amendment right to run their primaries as they see fit, and if the major parties choose to exclude outsiders, they can legally do so. And don’t forget that when Pat Buchanan tried to run against President Bush in the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, he was kept off the ballot in New York, South Dakota, and Kentucky.

Jeffrey Tucker Replies:

Here is one “group-based partition” we need: between taxpayers and would-be taxeaters. The primary contribution of the two-party system has been to shatter this, but he hasn’t explained why it is a should seek higher ideals, like freedom, that partition. Party leadership makes good thing. Every schoolboy knows that justice, and the common good. If it politics is the art of compromise; if true. this possible by silencing opponents of the social democratic muddle Mr. Weissberg appears to recognize world. An older tradition said politic takes third parties to remind us of that, Washington is the cultural center of the more political power to them.