Moderation, Realignment, or Transformation? Evaluating Three Approaches to America’s Crisis of Democracy

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Lee Drutman
• DOI: 10.1177/00027162221083494
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Parties, Movements, and Democracy: Peril and Promise

158 ANNALS, AAPSS, 699, January 2022

DOI: 10.1177/00027162221083494

Moderation,

Realignment, or

Trans formation?

Evaluating

Three

Approaches to

America’s Crisis

of Democracy

By

LEE DRUTMAN

1083494ANN The Annals of the American AcademyModeration, Realignment, or Transformation?

research-article2022

As American democracy remains in crisis, reform pro-

posals proliferate. I make two contributions to the

debate over how to respond to the current crisis. First,

I organize reform proposals into three main categories:

moderation, realignment, and transformation. I then

argue why transformation is necessary, given the deep

structural problems of American democracy. Only

reforms that fundamentally shake up the political coali-

tions and electoral incentives can break the escalating

two-party doom loop of hyperpartisanship that is

destroying the foundations of American democracy.

Keywords: polarization; electoral reform; political

transitions; democratic collapse

“The crisis of American democracy” is no

longer a mere essay-opening cliche. Although

the crisis has been mounting for years (Mettler

and Lieberman 2020), the escalating partisan

fights over what counts as a free and fair elec-

tion and the rapid degeneration of the

Republican Party into an antipluralist illiberal

party both pose an existential risk to the con-

tinuation of U.S. democracy.1 More specifically,

most Republican politicians now refuse to

acknowledge that President Joe Biden was

elected fairly (despite the failure to substantiate

any claims of a stolen election) and no longer

treat Democrats as the legitimate opposition.

When a major party decides that it is no

longer committed to the basic foundations of

democracy—free and fair elections in which all

voters count equally; legitimacy of the opposi-

tion; peaceful transfer of power; renunciation of

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform

program at New America. He is the author of Breaking

the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty

Democracy in America (Oxford University Press 2020)

and The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford

University Press 2015), winner of the 2016 American

Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award.

Correspondence: drutman@newamerica.org

MODERATION, REALIGNMENT, OR TRANSFORMATION? 159

violence—the shared legitimacy on which self-governance depends crumbles, and

the partisan rule of parties and men replaces the impartial rule of laws and institu-

tions (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Linz 1978; McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018).

Polarization has long been considered a risk to American democracy. But the

careening extremism of the Republican Party following the 2020 election has

marked a new phase, setting off alarms among a wide range of democracy

scholars.2 These two problems are related, of course. The Republican Party’s

radicalization would not have occurred without the same forces that drove parti-

san polarization—the sorting of the parties and the elevation of nationalized

culture war issues. But polarization has accelerated the radicalization because it

has both de-linked radicalization from electoral consequences (there appears to

be no real punishment for extremism; partisan loyalty is far more elastic than the

median voter theorem anticipates) and, worse, because polarization has elevated

the stakes of elections to a point where short-term victory is more important than

long-term commitment to democratic fairness. Two other factors are also crucial:

the growing economic inequality of the United States, both across and within

regions; and the racial reckoning and declining status of non-college-educated

whites as America transitions to a multiethnic democracy. Both of these have also

contributed importantly to the illiberal radicalization of the Republican Party

(Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018; Hacker and Pierson 2020). Any sustainable

solution to the current crisis of democratic careening must confront all of these

factors—polarization, the radicalization of the Republican Party, economic ine-

quality, and racial reckoning.

In this article, I aim to make two contributions. The first is to develop a tripar-

tite classification of the proposed reform solutions to the current crisis of demo-

cratic careening into three broad approaches moderation, realignment, and

transformation. Very briefly:

— Moderation emphasizes the need to elect more “moderates” as the solution.

— Realignment anticipates and hopes to accelerate a coming and semiperm-

anent period of Democratic Party dominance.

— Transformation argues for a large-scale restructuring of the U.S. political

system.

The second contribution is to explain why moderation and transformation are

unlikely to respond to the challenges facing U.S. democracy and, therefore, why

transformation is necessary. In brief: My argument is that the problems and chal-

lenges of American democracy at this moment are so deep that, at least in the

immediate term, only a major transformation can break through them.

Moderation

The first approach is moderation. The basic narrative guiding this approach is

simple: American democracy worked better when we elected more moderates.

But the parties have pulled to the extremes, making bipartisan compromise