I'm not big on parties. Especially political ones.

This essay series has yet to spare a single kind word for political parties, what with their nasty gamesmanship, fratty tribalism, bias-confirming blinders, hypocritical tommyrot, etc. But I'll try to muster a few here. Ahem: if you venture deep enough in the fetid, frowsy, frothy bathwater of partisanship, you may eventually detect the slightest hint of baby.

Parties, at their best, can develop coherent political ideas. They can poke holes in others' ideas that need poking. They can muster excitement for needed changes from the status quo. They can integrate people with shared ideas and shared needs. They can engage.

My beef with parties is not that they tie together people who agree, it's the cynical way that, particularly in the US, they tie together people who don't.

Each major US party continuously glosses over over meaningful, consequential differences between factions in order to unite against the greater enemy – the other party. Our current party dynamics have less to do with cultivating coherent ideas and more to do with fielding teams. Sides. Tribes. Enemies.

This is not how you build a nation. It's how you build two.

Among nations, the US sticks out for its stuckness in the two-party mire. The Democratic Party is the oldest active modern political party in the world¹; the Republican party is the second. The two distinctions are frankly embarrassing. Parties should be engines of democratic creativity, but we haven't created a party capable of gaining power since 1854. Our last such party light bulb came a decade and half before the invention of the actual light bulb.

Our problem isn't a lack of imagination, really; it's a series of system design vulnerabilities. First, we organize our elections into so-called "first-past-the-post" contests in discrete districts, which Duverger's Law says will tend to two parties. This setup doesn't always lead inexorably to two and only two parties (see Canada, UK, India...), but it nudges in that direction, and the US has other features that exacerbate things. Unlike those countries, our presidential elections encourage party unity to avoid vote splitting, especially with winner-take all Electoral College delegations. And our primaries encourage outsiders to infiltrate parties and shift them rather than form new ones. We've really trapped ourselves.

In fairness to the framers, not one of these designs were directly specified in the Constitution. The Constitution does not mention districts, for example (though Madison endorses them in the Federalist Papers). Most framers didn't envision winner-take-all delegations to the Electoral College, which some pictured as a deliberative body – it's easy to forget that the Constitution doesn't even call for a popular presidential vote. For a long time many state legislatures chose Electoral College delegates directly; as late as 1876, Colorado appointed their electors. Presidential primaries? They weren't on framers' radars at all; the first wasn't until 1912.

So we may not have intentionally designed a two-party system, but over time we've politicked our way into a robust two-party prison that even the world's richest man can't escape. We're here not because we like these two parties (we don't) or because founders wanted them (they didn't), but because of unintended design consequences.

The trap leaves us with two deeply entrenched parties that are simultaneously too big to succeed and too big to fail. They're too cumbersome to organize the political needs of a large and diverse nation, but splitting into smaller parties would spell certain defeat. The most binding issue either party has is hatred of the other. So they stoke fear and anger and cleave us in the process. Party, party. Cleavage, cleavage. Nowhere near as much fun as it sounds.

I hope it's clear, I do NOT advocate for wasting effort on new parties in the current system. For all the reasons above, they will fail. I do, however, advocate for constitutional change that would allow multiple parties to flourish.

Such change could take many forms. Despite my loud boos for elections, I'll concede that not all electoral systems are as bad as ours at cultivating fluid party dynamics. I won't dig far into them here, other than to note that if you would rather see the US elect, say, the House of Representatives using proportional representation (as implemented by some 130 countries around the world), then I wouldn't stand in the way of incremental improvement.

However, to deploy such ideas here you've got to change the Constitution. And, as argued ad nauseam in these essays, you will never get Congress to propose amendments that upend Congress; your best hope is for a citizens' constitutional convention. If there were such a convention, electoral reforms like these would very likely get a good hearing. Proportional representation and instant-runoff are both widely used and at least somewhat liked, so it's hard to imagine a general convention that didn't deliberate about them.

Of course, if I got to present to a constitutional convention, I would pitch solutions involving mini-publics. So what would that mean for parties?

The answer would depend on the system design, of course, but broadly we can say with some confidence that the flourishing of democratic lotteries would not spell the death of political parties. As Terry Bouricius argues:

Parties would inevitably change in an all-sortition system, but they would not necessarily atrophy. Active political parties have organized across the globe under non-electoral regimes, even when outlawed. Rather than contending in elections, parties would aim to influence the general public, who would form the mini-publics.

If parties will persist no matter what, it's worth asking what a healthy party system look like. What kinds of party dynamics could play a more constructive role in democracy?

I think the core of the answers to these questions lies in the difference between unity and wovenness.

Most of us now roll our eyes when politicians promise to "unify" us. Unity is not, to my mind, a very serious or even desirable goal, particularly to the extent that it implies enduring deep and broad agreement. Such agreement is possible (though far from inevitable) only when we all face a shared, severe, imminent threat, and often involves deferring to whoever's in charge. That's why a party feels most unified when its fear of the other party peaks. Fear is extremely handy for unity. Far preferable would be a political goal state that doesn't rely on terror.

A woven nation would feel quite different. On any given issue, the nation might still divide into camps. But as you move from issue to issue, the camps are completely different groups. Two people who agree on abortion may disagree on tax policy. Two people with similar approaches to regulating artificial intelligence may resonate on energy issues. What emerges is a rich weave: a weave of agreement and disagreement, a weave of sometime fellows and sometime foils, a weave of people whose perspectives can't easily be sorted into bi-colored maps.

I will not go far into solutions today, but I will suggest a few indicators of a health party system that weaves rather than cleaves.

First, in a healthy system parties can be narrow and issue-specific. They do not necessarily seek to form grand platforms that weigh in on all topics of political importance. Supporting a party should feel like advancing a good idea, not like going to war. For any given issue, there are multiple parties offering an array of perspectives and thinking deeply about designs and consequences. This encourages richer thinking about the scope of possibility and discourages simplifying to narratives of good versus evil. In such a world, citizens will naturally choose to affiliate with multiple parties.

Second, there should be little political cost to forming a new party in response to intra-party disagreement or emerging cultural issues. There's a cost in effort and resources to building anything new, of course, but there should be no political penalty, as there is today, for delineating political ideas. Nobody should feel trapped in a party they only somewhat agree with because the only other option is much worse.

And finally, parties die. Long-lived parties can engender deep multi-generation personal identification that trumps more open-minded political thought. Places should endure; cultures should endure; the natural world should endure; parties should come and go.

Clearly none of those healthy party dynamics are true in the US today. Nor are they remotely feasible within our current government structure. If we want healthy political parties ever, the structure must evolve.

Our failure to weave together isn't owed to incontrovertible "human nature." It's not an American cultural malady. It won't be fixed by voting out today's bums and voting in tomorrow's. We're here because of the political systems we have designed – or, really, fallen into.

And here we shall stay until we choose to upgrade.

Sorry to be a party pooper.