Can We Break Out of the Two-Party Doom Loop?

Date: 

Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Virtual event, registration required

The January 6 Capitol insurrection shows that the United States is facing exceptional challenges to our democracy. Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, thinks that our two-party system is a root cause of that dysfunction. Although we have had a two-party system in name for many decades, there were divisions and overlaps between parties that created room for bargaining, compromise, crossing over, and even unity. In our current state of hyper-polarization, however, the two parties are fully sorted, and this give-and-take has eroded into a death-match. According to Drutman, our democracy will not succeed unless we can escape this two-party doom loop.

In this talk, Drutman and Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, will discuss our two-party system and potential strategies for a critical, non-incremental move away from our dysfunctional "politics as usual."

Virtual Event Recording 

 

Event Audio Recording