Andrew Yang on Why Democrats Are In Crisis – by Yascha Mounk – Persuasion
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the book you ve just written and the kind of solutions we need in order to push our democracy forward. Universal Basic Income is one part of that, but what else should be on the agenda?
Yang: I have become convinced that the duopoly is dooming us. It took me a while to get there, but it really was in researching for my book after I came off the presidential trail that I realized that our two-party system is not designed to actually work. It’s designed to polarize us and make us more and more insane. It’s designed to inflame us, to aggravate us, to depress us, and to alarm us. Media organizations have the same incentives, and social media pours gasoline on all of it. The United States is anomalous in terms of only having two parties. This polarization is really, really unusual. European multipolar systems tend to have much higher resistance to authoritarianism. One party has to work with another in order to get anything done, which, by the way, was the original vision of the founding fathers, who were very anti-partisan. John Adams said two parties would be a great evil upon the republic in 1780. Fixing it seems nearly impossible because the duopoly defends itself.
I was inspired by the success in Alaska just this past year, where they shifted from closed-party primaries to open primaries and ranked-choice voting in 2020. This had immediate repercussions, because the Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican senator up for reelection in 2022 who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Her approval rating among Alaskan Republicans is, according to one poll, 6%. It is indeed political suicide to go against Trump. But now, she’s not subject to a party primary where only the Republicans will vote on whether to bring her back. She can bring her case to the entire Alaskan public, who will decide via ranked-choice voting if she’s in the top five, which she will be. That incentive switch freed up Senator Murkowski to vote according to her principles. We can do the same thing in other states around the country as quickly as possible we have about 12 months to do it. And I then realized that this is the genuine path that could save us from the dysfunction by making it so that our leaders aren’t catering to the 10 to 20% the most extreme voters but instead 50.1% of the general public.
I suspect Andrew is right about our two party system. His remarks remind me of what Michael Porter (HBS) has to say as well. Not quite sure about multi-party systems’ alleged resistance to authoritarianism, however. Europe has done worse than we have in this regard or at least one would think so. Here’s Porter on the two-party system:
https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-competition-in-the-politics-industry-is-failing-america.pdf