Americans are only a little less satisfied with our system of government than the people of South Africa, which is really saying something, given that South Africans as a whole are about half as safe and about a tenth as rich as Americans.
But that’s what the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center tell us. Americans, always exceptional, stand apart from the whole world on the question of satisfaction with our political system. Residents of our closest (but still distant) rivals for wealth — the Dutch, Australians and Swedes — are mostly satisfied with how their governments work.
Americans, though, are thoroughly fed up, with 77 percent saying that our political system needs “major changes” or “complete reform.” To find those kinds of numbers, you typically have to go places like Kenya and Brazil, where crushing poverty, violence and massive corruption are normal features of life.
We might explain this by “The Princess and the Pea” phenomenon by which Americans had become so accustomed to good government that irritants which would go unnoticed in other places feel like boulders on our back.
We also might be, in the words of Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death. Decades of peace, prosperity and safety have coincided with (or contributed to) steep declines in our individual feelings of purpose and connection. Politics, particularly radical politics, offers a cheaply bought sense of meaning and belonging.
That’s the kind of thinking that got us to a place where big majorities of Democrats (91 percent), Republicans (61 percent) and independents (80 percent) told pollsters in February that America is facing “a serious threat to the future of our democracy.” Be assured that the partisans mostly think the threat is exclusively from the other side. Which is why independents would be forgiven for thinking that both parties constitute a serious threat — because they do.
Republicans tried to steal the 2020 election. When Democrats took power, they responded with an effort to nationalize elections under more favorable terms for their party. When Republicans got back in control, they attempted the same thing. Now, both parties are engaged in a titanic struggle to rig congressional maps from coast to coast to either muffle or amplify the preferences of certain voters. No wonder that people think democracy is in trouble.
Eighty-four percent of independent voters told pollsters last fall that “the United States is in a political crisis.” Democrats and Republicans flip back and forth on these kinds of questions depending on which team won the most recent election. But unaffiliated voters, the largest part of the electorate, are deeply concerned in ways that can’t be soothed by the next swing of the pendulum. Indeed, each “vibe shift” further convinces them that the system is see-sawing out of control.
That’s life in a dysfunctional two-party republic. The way elections are conducted — particularly partisan primaries and strict ballot-access rules — and the way Congress is organized means we can live in a country in which the plurality of voters belong to neither party but that only those parties are viable avenues for political action.
When it works well, the two-party system forces coalitional debates to be hashed out within the smaller bodies before being inflicted on the larger public. And when they do their jobs, parties are exceptionally good vehicles for vetting potential leaders. Plus, unlike in a parliamentary system, a two-party republic allows for competition and cooperation between the branches of government. Gridlock can lead to bargaining, allowing the government to address pressing problems even when neither side has a mandate.
But, of course, that’s not what we have now. Americans, bequeathed a republic by our founders, have reverse-engineered a parliamentary system in which no major questions can be addressed unless one party controls both the legislative and executive branches. The incentives of the primary election system forbid bipartisanship, so we just wait for the next wave election and for the tumblers to be reset for the next onslaught of party-line policies.
So, what we have are two parties, neither one competent to govern on its own but also unable to work constructively with each other. The leaders of those parties, then, should look with alarm to Britain’s genuine parliamentary system and the truly remarkable election results at the end of last week.
It’s been 15 years since the U.K. has had a stable, successful government. After former Prime Minister David Cameron stepped down following his failed bid to beat the Brexit vote, his Conservative Party cycled through four prime ministers in short order, stacking failure upon failure. It got so bad that voters became desperate enough to return to the Labour Party, which had been wandering in a wilderness of kooky radicalism for a decade.
Last week’s vote, which was something like a midterm for embattled Prime Minister Keir Starmer, was expected to be bad for Labour and, therefore, good for Conservatives. That only proved to be half right. Starmer’s party did take a historic shellacking, and the calls for his resignation are piling up.
But it wasn’t the Tories who benefited. Instead, the Reform Party, author of the original Brexit win, gobbled up seats on the right while the left-wing Green Party undercut Labour from the left. Forecasters now estimate that there will be five or six parties large enough to take significant numbers of seats in the next national elections, foreshadowing a coalition government and, potentially the end of the two-party consensus that has mostly held since before World War II.
The Brexit vote 10 years ago appears to have been the beginning, not the object, of a populist revolt in the U.K. that foreshadowed President Trump’s first presidential win. Our British cousins have an easier system to disrupt, so even their lower levels of dissatisfaction — 58 percent compared to our seething 77 percent — can boil over before our own. But American leaders should be very worried about what happens when fed-up Americans finally blow the lid off. A republic may be harder to break, but it’s harder to put back together, too.
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