When America sends the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute abroad, they are teaching the rest of the world the best political system invented so far, the worst one except for all the others as Churchill said, the system at the end of history as Fukuyama declared, the system that peoples around the globe fought and bled for, multiparty democracy.
Ideally, two-party democracy, so that people have a choice, but not too much choice.
Never mind that rather undemocratic means can be used to keep other parties out of the game; or that begging rich people for campaign money is the principal activity of American politicians; or that politicians do not do what they promised; or that decisions like investment, pricing, money supply, energy and military planning are either jointly private-public or entirely private matters outside of democratic control.
There’s a jest in the East that in the Chinese system you can change the policy but not the party, while in America you can change the party but not policy.
This is another thing the genocide should have taught us. After an American election season where both parties promised enthusiastically to continue the genocide of Palestinians, while in other Western countries parties compete to show the most fealty to the genocidal state, Western electorates have never been more helpless. Given the opportunity to change the party, they’ll change the party. But it makes no difference.
In the Global South, elections often matter. They’re high stakes affairs for several reasons. First, a real alternative might get into office and engage in actual wealth redistribution, land reform, or measures towards economic sovereignty. Second, if voters dare to vote for such an alternative the country will face US-backed coups, sanctions, and sabotage.
In the West, though, democracies are more mature. The most important policies won’t be changed through something as capricious as the public will. Americans who want Medicare For All, for their police to kill fewer of them each year, or simply an end to the genocide, can’t vote those in. The notion of asking the public to vote on regime change, covert wars, or overt ones, in Eastern Europe or West Asia - is even more ridiculous.
Analytical energy is being wasted on what the Biden administration is trying to do before Trump comes in, or how Trump might want to take on the deep state but for now he has to bide his time, or in Canada how hapless the liberal leader is and how prime ministerial the conservative candidate looked in the latest podcast video with an immensely popular, totally conventional pro-Israel commentator who is of course portrayed as an outsider and maverick.
In the West, these frothy shows known as elections are of tremendous value to the corporate interests and owners of private fortunes that decide whether the masses of the Global South will have peace or genocide, whether the masses of the Global North will have public health care and education or crumbling infrastructure. To name a few of these benefits:
Elections channel nearly all the mass energy for change into the false hope of change, stabilizing corporate rule and hiding it behind the scenes.
The media / social media spectacle employs otherwise idle journalists, professionals, and political operators, while circulating and laundering billions of dollars.
It’s a huge distraction and diversion of attention, pre-empting the possibility of large numbers of people working - or even strategizing about what it would actually take - to change policies.
The belief that established Western political parties offer meaningful differences in policy from one another has taken different forms.
Advocates of lesser-evilism admit that the differences between what parties do in power are actually very small, but argue that these small differences matter and so it’s important to go and vote for the lesser evil.
Advocates of strategic voting argue that you need not like a party or candidate but that you should vote for them anyway to fulfill some broader strategic objective, which is usually blocking the party you don’t like from coming to power.
I propose subsuming these variants and coining the word, partyism, for any form of the belief that Western political parties are meaningfully different on important policy matters. Partyism can never be disproven, since we could never know what the loser would have done had the winner not won. We could only ever speculate. But circumstantial evidence against partyism is presented every time a party betrays their electoral promises - something that does happen from time to time, though notably, neither Harris nor Trump were willing even to make a promise to end the genocide that they could later renege on.
Instead of falling into the partyist trap, look at a country’s billionaires, the statements by the chambers of commerce, the policies advocated for the country in America’s business newspapers (regardless of which country you’re in). Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have done a big study twenty years ago and another ten years ago to show that politicians listen to the rich, not to you.
You know who’s not in this picture? You.
Partyism serves as a crucial smokescreen for the autocratic tendencies of the American regime that Justin recently highlighted. When you add together the prohibitive costs of elections, winner-take-all states, gerrymandered districts, the electoral college, the Senate and the filibuster, and the influence of partisan judges alongside relentless lobbying along party lines, it's clear that the political landscape is rigged. We don’t need to delve into "policy outcomes" to recognize that a bipartisan consensus will dictate everything. Martin Gilens’ book, "Affluence and Influence," published in 2012, seemed widely read in polisci-world. Yet, their findings were met with a collective W/e. My surmise is that Gilens and Page's appeal had more to do with some fancy polisci statistics that they used to carefully measure blades of grass to confirm what we already knew: the bipartisan consensus overwhelmingly caters to the affluent. And then came Trump, the gift to partyism that keeps giving—no need to be concerned about “nice things” at home. Don't be childish! And, of course, there is no need to be concerned about the holocaust in Gaza, mass murder in Lebanon, and picking a war with Russia and China. Those things are, wait for it, part of the bipartisan consensus! What we need to do is appeal to the median voter, who is thankfully forever stuck in partyism.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of partyism is its profound brain drain. As an (erstwhile) political science lecturer, I often met students eager to pursue progressive or even tankie politics being forced into internships or paid positions with Democratic Congress members or required to work on campaigns for Democratic candidates. For those aspiring to work in international politics, the options often narrow down to organizations like NDI or NED. In small-town America, city council offers some appeal until the frustrating reality that mundane but necessary policies—like installing bicycle lanes or enforcing regular inspections on local landlords don't match the will of bipartisan consensus.
Democracy is not mentioned one time in the US constitution. I was aware of that but I didn’t realize how much of a sham representative government is in the USA. Thanks for sharpening our focus past the facade with your concept of partyism.
As far as mythologized revolutions are concerned, the American one is the most overrated in history. Am I wrong? Haiti, France, Russia, Iran, etc., were all more substantive than the one in the colonies. And anything good in the US constitution was borrowed from somewhere else, like Locke and Montesquieu. They were not original thinkers, the so-called Founders. Also, when the same people stay in power, then it actually isn’t a revolution. So, it’s essentially the same slaveowning Anglo-American gentry ruling us up until today. The oligarchs behind partyism. They were not actually overthrown, they just removed the royal governors.
I had hope in the British Parliamentary system. Way more advanced than America’s backward system. Others here probably can say more on this topic, but when you fashion your constitution after the Roman Republic then indeed anything like Athenian democracy was deliberately aborted from the beginning.