You don't belong to a political party. You rent one.
Why America will never have a third party, or a "hard" party either, and that's a good thing.
Please note: this essay is reposted from last week, as I consolidate all writing into one Substack. Please pardon my dust!
My friends are frustrated with me. They know I’m political (though I maintain that I am not “into politics”, it’s just what everyone’s talking about, and I like to talk) and so they want me to pick a side. Everyone today wants you to pick a side. Because I’m vocally proud to be an American, they assume I’m on one side. Because I’m an educated professional working in California and New York, they assume I’m on another. Because I’m a classical liberal, my friends on the left claim me as theirs, and my friends on the right make the same claim—until I open my mouth, which is when they get frustrated.
I’m frustrated, too. Not by how political everything has become, but by how partisan so many of my previous apolitical friends have become. That latter point—the absurdly intense partisanship of today—is the most ridiculous feature of this political moment, and the strongest signal that our country has a collective fever that will, mercifully, soon break.
People seem to have two primary misunderstandings about the American two-party system.
First, America will never have a third party. Not a successful one, anyway. It is structurally impossible, and even if it weren’t, it would be unnecessary and wasteful. Second, even if we could escape the two-party system, a “harder” version of party politics—one with real ideological discipline and centralized command—would not be an improvement. It would be a disaster.
Duverger’s Law states that, in single-member districts with first-past-the-post voting (i.e., whoever gets 50%+1 vote, wins), a stable two-party system will emerge. This is easy enough to see: imagine three parties that each split ~30% of the vote. Whichever two parties compromise first and merge will have a supermajority, leading back to the two-party system.
But in reality, there are dozens of independent political “parties” in the country. We call them interest groups. You surely belong to a few yourself. One way of understanding the political parties is that each of them is trying to cater to as many interest groups as possible to form a 50%+1 coalition.
Though incentives drive interest group politics, ideology does too—just not at the level of the Democratic or Republican parties. Pew Research defines a political topology of nine different ideological groups that shift across election cycles: from right to left, they see the Faith and Flag Conservatives, Committed Conservatives, the Populist Right, the Ambivalent Right, the Stressed Sideliners, the Outsider Left, the Democratic Mainstays, Establishment Liberals, and Progressive Leftists. These groups broadly correspond to the two parties but vary election-to-election in their commitment to actually voting for their party.
But there is a more illuminating way to understand “political parties” in America that merges interest groups and ideologies. We can think of Unionists, Tech-libertarians, Left-Hippies, Democratic Socialists, Heritage WASPs, and other such groups as political parties as they are understood in multi-party parliamentary systems. For example, Unionists are long-time members of the Democratic Party, but shifted to the GOP under Trump. So too with the Tech-libertarians, who were part of the Obama and Biden coalitions but found themselves increasingly unwelcome after 2021—pushed out over COVID policy, content moderation battles, and regulatory hostility—and became prominent voices in Trump’s winning 2024 coalition. The so-called Never Trumpers are made up of several disaffected factions of George W. Bush’s 2004—Heritage WASPs, wealthy Evangelicals, and Neoconservatives—and two of their most famous flagbearers, Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol, publicly voted for Kamala Harris. Big banks, international financiers, and the healthcare industry were once firmly GOP constituencies, but many joined the Democrats during Obama’s first term after receiving favorable legislation.
That’s the way it works. Voters follow ideologies and incentives, and interest groups form around that voting power, and the most successful ones form institutions that negotiate coalitions.
The key point: the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee are not the institutionalized form of these coalitions. They are service providers to them. They provide electoral-infrastructure-as-a-service to whoever can scrape together a big enough coalition and raise enough money to afford their services. That’s why both parties have been for and against big government, small government, high taxes, low taxes, foreign wars, isolationism, multiculturalism, nationalism, you name it. They do not have an ideological core, because they are service providers.
Understood this way, American parties are “soft” parties, and that’s a good thing. In a soft party, there is no “party line”—and, if one emerges, it’s very hard to enforce discipline around it. The party itself is not involved in governing; it’s simply a platform for those doing the governing. This is obvious enough from practice: even though members of the GOP are in control of all three branches of government today, it is not Joe Gruters who runs the country—you probably don’t even know who Joe Gruters is (he’s the Chairman of the Republican National Committee). Donald Trump himself doesn’t even run the country, contrary to popular wish-casting on both sides. He still relies on a Congress that he can bully but not command, and he has vocal opponents within his own party at both the state and federal levels. He enjoys nothing even close to the control over government that the heads of so-called “hard” parties, like Stalin and Xi over their respective Communist Parties, or Hitler over his Nazi Party.
America does not have a hard party, it never had one and never will. That, also, is a good thing. Hard parties are antithetical to the American way of life. Curtis Yarvin, perhaps the leading public intellectual in favor of hard parties, recently wrote:
“America needs a new kind of political party, which is actually an old kind of party: a hard party. A hard party is a party designed to take unconditional control of the state. A hard party is a party in which all members delegate 100% of their political energy to the party’s command. Joining a hard party is a political marriage, not an election-night hookup with any random politician whose name on a lawn sign catches your eye.”
He describes the predicament of a would-be authoritarian American President, trying to seize power under our current system of government without the help of a hard party:
“Imagine you’re the President. But you don’t have a hard party.
Without a hard party, you have neither the tools needed to capture political power, nor the tools to use it.
Without a hard party, you have no cadre of officers. So you have enormous limitations on staffing a new regime. If office-seekers are not vetted for loyalty, your administration is filled with snakes. If they are vetted for loyalty, the process is an enormous bottleneck full of office politics and weird false negatives. You don’t even have the option of replacing the old government—you don’t have the staff for it. ...
Without a hard party, you cannot even think about controlling other politicians. Your influence over your own party in Congress is very weak. You cannot replace or even threaten senior Senators or Representatives. They always have the infrastructure to win their primaries. Running for Congress is fundamentally artisanal. Primary candidates need to walk in off the street and build their own infrastructure.”
Of course, as a monarchist and advocate of absolute state power, Yarvin thinks all that is a bad thing, because he sees (incorrectly) the modern Democratic Party—not simply within the DNC power structure, but across its aligned NGOs and media orgs—as a hard party, albeit a decentralized one. So, he argues, if the left has a hard party, then the right needs one, too. Otherwise, the left will win, formally entrench their power, and will “protect our democracy” by imprisoning their opponents and outlawing dissent.
But, a hard party requires centralized decision-making authority, enforceable discipline over members, and the ability to purge dissent. The decentralized Democrats have none of these. It’s a loose network of interest groups—unions, environmentalists, civil rights organizations, public sector employees, academics, journalists, rank-and-file progressives—that are always fighting with another, united only by their visceral hatred of Donald Trump. They often move in the same direction because they are moving opposite to whichever way Donald Trump is moving, not because there’s some shadowy hard party cabal calling the shots.
I take Yarvin to mean that the alignment is the whole ballgame—that a “decentralized hard party” achieves command-like outcomes without formal command structure, through shared ideology and institutional capture of the media, universities, and nonprofit treasuries. Maybe so, but this proves too much. By this definition, any successful coalition is a “hard party,” and the term loses meaning. The test of a hard party is not whether its members do agree but whether they must agree—whether deviation is punished, whether the party can enforce discipline, whether it can purge (and no, though they cancel each other all the time, it’s not the same). Like Trump, the Democrats can’t keep their powerful dissenters in line, as we saw with Senators Manchin, Sinema, and Fetterman.
More fundamentally, our system of government prevents hard parties as effectively as it prevents third parties. Any attempt to build one faces a structural paradox: to succeed in elections, it must build coalitions—archetypal soft-party, infrastructure-as-a-service behavior. But to maintain governing discipline, it must purge coalition members who deviate—destroying the source of its own power. Every “disciplined” faction in American politics has either softened to survive (the Tea Party was absorbed into the GOP mainstream within a decade) or remained marginal (the Libertarian Party, the Greens, the Communist Party USA). The soft-party system metabolizes hard-party attempts.
(Of course, Yarvin would call all of this naive, that I’m miseducated by “centuries of bogus political science which has taught them that government can be “limited,” and power is not a zero-sum game.” Maybe, but for now I’ll cling to my naiveté.)
The productive response to political frustration is not to build a new party or seize the state, but to play the game of coalitional politics as it actually exists. Our politics works. It only feels broken because democracy is hard and no one wants to do hard things any more. We just have to actually play the game, debate and negotiate and compromise, instead of defaulting to revolutionary fantasies every time someone disagrees with us.
Identify the interest groups that represent your values. Talk to friends that disagree with you, see where your interests intersect. Recognize that politics is negotiation, not conquest, and that the system’s frustrating inability to deliver total victory to anyone is precisely what preserves the space for you to keep playing.
We are all being asked to pick a side, but the “sides” are not the parties—they are the dozens of factions constantly jockeying within and between them. I have picked many sides. I just refuse to pretend that the coalition of the moment is a permanent identity, or that the service provider running the election infrastructure deserves my loyalty. Loyalty to a coalition is sensible. Loyalty to a platform is strategy. Loyalty to a party—the legal fiction, the service provider, the brand—is just silly.