A Three Party Country in a Two Party System

This fact of our institutional structure isn’t given nearly enough weight or consideration in our political discussions (via Matt Yglesias):

Third, there’s weak party discipline. If the House Blue Dogs were subjected to the kind of very tight party discipline that exists in many countries, they would have a strong incentive to try to form some kind of independent political organization. But since US politics features weak discipline, it’s easier to stay within a party coalition and then form an intra-party factional organization.

It’s not just that there’s weak party discipline, it’s that its hard to characterize the Democratic Party as a single party. Rather, as I was explaining to a friend not too long ago, it’s much more accurate to think of the “two-party” system as a “three-party” system with one of those parties in a long-term alliance with the other for electoral reasons.  The United States has three major parties: a medium-sized center-left party, the Democratic Party, that is mostly concentrated on the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, with a few seats in the Rust Belt.  A center-right party, the Blue Dogs, which are concentrated in the West and the Rust Belt, with strongholds in the South.  And a small right-wing party, the Republican Party, which is almost entirely concentrated in the South, with strongholds in the West and the interior of California.

This is a banal point, but it really needs to be made more often: the country isn’t “fundamentally conservative” but it also isn’t terribly friendly to explicitly progressive policies and goals.  The fact that we have a two-party system masks that, and fools us into thinking that we, progressives, have a much larger majority than we actually do.

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