Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics

2: Protecting Major-Party Turf

2 Protecting Major-Party Turf Our democracy is but a name. We vote. What does that mean? . . . We choose between two . . . bodies of autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Helen Keller The necessity for [strict scrutiny] becomes evident when we consider that major parties, which by definition are ordinarily in control of legislative institutions, may seek to perpetuate themselves at the expense of developing minor parties. Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting in Munro v. Socialist Workers Party (1986) Over the years some of the most vocal critics of America’s party system have declared that there really are not two major national parties. They contend that there are just two branches of one party—two brands in effect, one Democratic, the other Republican, both offering nearly identical products to the voting consumer. Helen Keller believed this. Remembered for her bravery, perseverance, and the remarkable life she lived in the face of her deafness and blindness, Keller was an activist in the left-wing politics of her day. She belonged to the Socialist Party, campaigned for Socialist candidates, and took part in the National Woman’s Party, the militant wing of the suffragist movement. According to Keller the Republican and Democratic parties are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, those two look-alike, think-alike curmudgeonly characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found (1871). George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama politician who took nearly 14 percent of the presidential vote in 1968 running on his American Independent Party ticket, believed it too.“There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat [sic] and Republican parties,” Wallace charged in the heat of his third-party campaign. Even some prominent Democrats and Republicans have lamented the sameness of the products their parties have sometimes offered voters. Harry Truman thought Protecting Major-Party Turf 17 that Democratic candidates defeat themselves when they talk and act like Republicans , because when they do, “people will vote for the real Republican all the time.” In selecting“A Choice, Not an Echo”as his campaign theme or mantra, Barry Goldwater , the GOP’s conservative 1964 presidential nominee, was in effect criticizing his own party for three decades of following at the heels of its Democratic rival. Those whose frame of political reference has been the 1990s and since may want to dispute the notion of Tweedledum and Tweedledee as characters representing the two major parties. In President Clinton’s impeachment and trial for lying under oath about his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, and then in the high-stakes 2000 struggle over Florida’s disputed presidential votes, the two parties’ behavior was more like armies at war than similar brands. Toxic became the adjective of choice in media reporting of the unfriendly, even dysfunctional, relationship between congressional Republicans and Democrats during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies; and partisan rancor and strife continued after President Obama’s inauguration in spite of the new president’s resolve to reach across the aisle and to set in Washington a “postpartisan” tone. There are those who see all this as little more than smoke and mirrors. Whatever the truth about a breach between Republicans and Democrats, nothing indicates any erosion or weakening of the two parties’ shared interest in and commitment to protecting their exclusive places in the center ring of American politics. Micah Sifry Helen Keller, 1905. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Obtained through Wikimedia Commons. 18 Challengers to Duopoly has described the system as“a one-party system shared by two parties.”1 That may be the most accurate designation of America’s duopoly as its exists today. Politics as Hardball “Politics ain’t beanbag. Tis a man’s game, and women, children, an’ pro-hybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” So said Mr. Dooley, the fictional very Irish saloonkeeper and homespun philosopher in Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley in Peace and War (1898).2 Dunne meant to convey that politics bears no resemblance to a gentle children ’s game. Politics is hardball, and it is the very tough and committed who have the chance to survive and thrive in it. Dunne provides a useful insight as one looks at the cards that have been stacked against third parties. There are measures—the very teeth of duopoly—that flagrantly discriminate and were designed for the purpose of...