The System We Have… And The Ways It Should Change
A week ago, I, a First-Year Democrat, sat down with four UVA students to talk about the American party system, but the conversation transitioned into far more. We discussed our frustrations with the party system, but also with the American government. We explored the ways political ideology can change in people and in societies; and we talked about the ways in which a party or a label fails to represent the people who use it.
When I started planning for the roundtable, my goal was to discover a turning point. I wanted to find a crucial moment, or moments, which could lead a person to create a political identity that they were willing to defend in front of others. So, I worked to recruit passionate, informed students who did not fit our image of the typical conservative or the typical liberal.
Unsurprisingly, our roundtable also did not fit the image in my head. This wasn’t a group of people who were passionate advocates for the entirety of their party platform, but rather a group of people who compromised to find a party or an ideology which best fit their primary goals. In this way, I stumbled upon a group of students who quite accurately depicted their fellow University students and the general American populace.
And rather than being passionate advocates for their world view and the system as a whole, they approached the whole situation with a sense of what I will call resigned indignation. They are indignant at a system that repeatedly fails to represent them or enact the policies they support, but resigned to the reality that these parties and systems will continue to fail at materializing real change.
But this simple, two-worded characterization fails to cover the complexity of ideas that these four students represented, just as no two-worded title could ever encompass the totality of any group.
Katherine Henessey is a Republican troubled by the impact of government on small businesses — and ways in which the government involves itself with the capitalist process. Enkhbilig Bilge Batsuskh is another Republican whose main interests include trade policy and taxes. Griffin Mahon is a socialist concerned with health care and ending our wars. Lastly, is Smita Malhi, a Democrat passionate about health care issues and climate change.
Despite identifying as Republicans, Democrats, or in Griffin’s case, a Socialist, no one was in complete agreement with their party’s platform.
Bilge Batsuskh: I would like to see the GOP take one focus on the climate issues. And stop caring so much about LGBTQ issues.
Katherine Henessey: A lot of young conservatives would agree with you. I think most young conservatives are far more libertarian when it comes to social policies such as gay marriage and those sorts of rights. And that's not the line that the party's taken for a long time and so they've alienated a lot of different people who might agree with a lot of the things that the party does.
BB: Yeah, I mean if you just look at how great a job the GOP is excluding everyone but white people. Oh my God.
Smita Malhi: I know that I have a hard time identifying as a Democrat just because I don't really like the party. I identify as more of a progressive than a Democrat because I think the DNC doesn't do [anything]. I think there is a divide with moderate democrats and more progressive Democrats… there's frustration that the Democratic Party doesn't really understand.
Vani Agarwal: So what is the goal of the party system and what are the real outcomes of the party system compared to those goals?
SM: I guess like our party system implies that the political spectrum is linear and we're to the left and right. And so the idea is to have a party that represents each type of ideology and then create policies so we’ll end up towards the middle. But the result is that it just creates a lot of gridlock in government, so not much gets done.
KH: But I think that the way the system is set up is that it takes an overwhelming amount of want for something to change, which I think is often a good thing, not always, but more often than not, a good thing. I don't think our party system is failing as much as the Congress is failing on working on any level. They don't write their own bills anymore. They don't read them. They filibuster everything. They just don't work as a Congress.
BB: Yeah, I don't think the party system is exactly failing, more than it's just moving slower than people seem to want these days.
Griffin Mahon: In the US, most parties, they're essentially fundraising apparatuses that are written into law. And we have very strict or difficult to surpass barriers for third parties especially in terms of just the number of signatures you need to get. It is very low in other countries, but here it's quite high.
GM: Ideally, what parties should do is represent really distinct political positions that correspond to different preferences that voters should have. I don't know that we have parties that are so different that they actually correspond to those differences. They are very similar in some ways that they should be different and they're very different in some ways that they should be similar.
GM: For example, the process of handing power over to the executive, that’s been a bipartisan project supported by the leading elements of both parties. There's a clear preference within the military, within the public, within society, for ending our wars, but politicians won't do it. And the ways they are different where they should be similar are just general ideas about efficiency and not like budding interest into people's lives as others have alluded to.
SM: But even if they lowered the barriers of entry to have more third parties, it's just going to take a fundamental change because the people who are [for example] traditionally Republican are going to get mad at those who try to leave.
BB: Public politics is ultimately an organization game and in order to organize, large numbers of people you have to have labels… Obviously there are negatives to it, as in people not being entirely satisfied with their own parties, but ultimately the point of party politics [is to] help people create coalitions in order to write policy.
KH: I think you're right, it makes things more efficient, it allows people to get things that they want done to get done. And at the end of the day, you certainly have politicians who fall outside the norm — you have Rand Paul and you have Bernie Sanders. You have coalitions inside like the [Congressional] Black Caucus and the Tea Party and you have debate.
GM: They make you think that you have a shared fight which can be useful in directing people's efforts and energy and enthusiasm.
KH: I think what happens is that the parties change; we've always seen this happen. They are not stationary, views are not stationary, they're made out of people, people die, people are born, people change their minds. And so, when there is a groundswell from the bottom up for a change in the party. As new generations come along I think that the party adapts to fill that void.
VA: So, what do you think causes these shifts in ideology — on an individual level, but also on a societal level?
KH: There is a perception that more people have become radicalized on right and left, whereas I would argue that there is a silent majority and a very loud minority. The barrier to entry to showing your views, now that the media has become democratized, is much lower.
SM: The rhetoric used by politicians in the media can really sway people. I feel like recently there's been more candidates with populist rhetoric [who] have been organizing the country and creating the perception that there is more polarization.
BB: Students are a lot more moderate than I would have gathered from watching a reading about student protests.
GM: I don't know that most people are moderate but rather that most people have not thought for an extended period of time in a rigorous way about what political beliefs they hold. This means that people just have a lot of positions which, if you were to ask them to write down all individually, would appear kind of incoherent. And, yeah, of course there's how politicians are speaking about certain things.
KH: Regarding what you said about people not really understanding their views, I think that is part of the reason why people are scared to listen to other opinions and so they block them out. Instead they listen to confirmation bias media because they aren't comfortable hearing another side and still being able to think what they think. And I think that's dangerous.
GM: And it's not just necessarily party affiliation, but I think class really determines whether you are sort of like turned on or turned off to politics. The percentage of people who even pay attention to the media or vote, because they expect their lives will change from participating in the political process, is quite low as evidenced by the number of people who participate in our presidential primaries.
GM: Class is like more helpful in explaining politics because there are the people who spend a lot of their days working, maybe a third of their total hours, and the experience you have at work, because it's so much at a time, can really shape how you approach the rest of the world. I think that those are the experiences that people have shaped their worldviews more than other variables.
VA: So do you think our democracy represents the people?
SM: I don’t know if [our democracy] represents the people. Sometimes I feel like it represents the people at the very top because corporations can kind of have a lot of influence on what happens politically.
BB: No, I think it doesn't represent the people but that can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. I think the state should be much more populistic while the federal government remains much more aloof from the individual people's day to day lives.
KH: And I agree that it's good to not have a reactionary group of millions voting on every little thing and swaying our country from drastic rights to [drastic] lefts... But I will say there are certain things that were never supposed to happen such as career politicians. It seems like the inner workings of the government seem to favor the people in the government more than the people outside of the government.
GM: I think an aspect of it is essentially the federal system meaning that a lot of political energy is expended upon battles over jurisdiction between state states in the federal government. It has the effect of making sure that a lot of what happens with our governments in our country is actually decided by unaccountable lawyers, essentially….particularly with the nature of the Supreme Court as a body that exists for life.
GM: I think it puts a whole lot of power in the hands of a few people.
KH: And that goes back to our Congress just not doing its job. And, and kicking things to the executive and judicial branch, because they can't figure it out.
GM: I personally wish we had a democratic republican form of government. We have two parties both of which have names that I like, but we do not, unfortunately, have a democratic republic.