Fusion power: why only two parties is no fun.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: 'The Tyranny of the Two-Party System' - Book Review

The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, by Lisa Jane Disch, New York: Columbia University Press, 194 pages, $45/$19.50 paper

THE TWO-PARTY system once severely strained my relationship with my roommate. It was the summer of 1988, and my roommate--also my best pal--was informally managing the local petition drive to get the Libertarian presidential candidate, Ron Paul, on Florida's ballot. He offered up our very small apartment--I was already sleeping in what normally would be the living room--as a crash pad for the kids who were dedicating their summer to dunning apprehensive and often hostile strangers for signatures in Gainesville's hellish heat and humidity.

I literally couldn't get out of bed without having to step across a well-meaning political neophyte. Since I, too, wanted Ron Paul on the ballot, I mostly swallowed my annoyance, but that sort of pent-up exasperation can wreak havoc on a happy home. And I'm sure the campaign workers were none too thrilled to be sleeping on a stranger's floor while pursuing their ill-paid, frustrating mission.

Under the best of circumstances, getting third-party candidates on the ballot is onerous and expensive. The numerous procedural hoops they and their supporters must jump through exacerbate the tensions inherent in fighting for heterodox political beliefs in America, adding heavily to the psychic costs of everyone involved.

Which means the system is working exactly as intended.

In The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, Lisa Jane Disch, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, examines the reality of two-party hegemony. More than that, she lays bare the mental framework that she believes sanctions such a system. As Disch tells it, the two-party system dominates through more than just the legal barriers that require third parties to expend enormous amounts of money and effort, under restrictive and complicated conditions, just to get to the starting line of political competition. She argues that the system also works as a monolithic ideological construct that makes it difficult even to imagine a vibrant, multi-party political marketplace.

Disch makes an interesting and meaningful distinction between the reality of a system that has two dominant parties and a "two-party system." The first is quite possibly a necessary result of America's single-member-district, first-past-the-post electoral format, which effectively rules out the coalition governments common to parliamentary systems.

Yet Disch argues that the "two-party system" is something else altogether. It's a rhetorical construct that rules the discipline of political science and has become a veritable civic religion. She writes that the two-party system is a "system of meaning" that "associates third party candidates with lost causes, political extremism, and authoritarian populism while promoting established party candidates as the responsible and effective choice." Being third in a two-party system relegates you to the margins.

While the two-party system meets the known and stated political demands of many--probably most--Americans, it impoverishes our political discourse. It creates barriers to the creation of now-unknown political choices, in the same way that restrictions on introducing new consumer products might not violate any known, specifically statable preference but still diminish everyone's well being.

Although Disch spends little time on it, the history of third parties in America is...