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The American electorate is facing the most serious threat to our democracy since the Civil War. Many believe that if Donald Trump is elected president again, we face a real possibility that he will erode our democratic institutions past the breaking point to retain power. Others believe that whether Trump or Joe Biden resides in the White House over the next four years, the threats to our democratic republic will not abate given the growing anti-democratic forces embraced by the U.S. citizenry.
The U.S. is not experiencing a momentary political dysfunction. Our constitutional system is broken. And without radical reform, the country risks the fate of so many other democracies throughout history: collapse or dictatorship.
The disease wreaking havoc with our democracy is a two-party system rooted in presidentialism. The framers of the Constitution never intended political parties and believed the governmental system they created would avoid them altogether. And yet, the constitutional structures they put in place paved the way for a two-party duopoly that has divided our politics and placed our democracy at a crossroads. To emerge from this crisis a thriving democracy, we need more political parties that play a meaningful role in governance. To get there, we’ll need to transform our presidential system of government into a parliamentary one.
I reached this conclusion after studying how other nations around the globe practice democracy. I analyzed seven present and former democracies that have succeeded or failed in facing down their own institutional threats — England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and Venezuela. A virtual tour of those nations, with insights from other nations along the way, reveals that thriving democracies avoid the twin dangers of too many parties or too few. Political scientists recognize that four to eight parties is the ideal number, and that a system known as mixed-member proportionality, or MMP — which originated in Germany following World War II — is best suited to achieving that goal. To emerge from our crisis of democracy, we must borrow some of the practices of these other countries and become Parliamentary America.
I propose three specific reforms — each corresponding to a constitutional amendment — that together can save our constitutional democracy. The first amendment would enlarge the House of Representatives and ensure proportional representation. The second would shift presidential and vice presidential selection from elections among voters to party coalitions in the House of Representatives. And the third would empower a supermajority of House members to remove a sitting president for maladministration based on no confidence. Together, these reforms would end the two-party duopoly, create space for genuine third parties, end partisan gerrymandering, temper vote suppression, moderate the most extreme ideologies, reduce polarization, and incentivize negotiation and compromise.
The first electoral reform amendment doubles the House — from 435 to 870 members — with half continuing to be elected by district, a new cohort elected by party and the entire chamber based on proportional representation. The amendment ensures a fixed size that can be altered by statute, and it assesses proportionality by state. Party proportionality won’t be perfect, but it will be good enough to break the party duopoly and let smaller — third, fourth or more — parties thrive despite not capturing a majority of voters or electors to the Electoral College. It rewards voters who support smaller parties, no longer admonishing them, each election cycle, that doing so wastes their votes.