End of the Two-Party System?

Is Donald Trump a temporary aberration of the (apparent) voting preference of America? Or is he a sign of a more fundamental change, the rise of a “solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc”, asks Danielle Allen.

Now because America has a two-party system, such a shift is perceived as sweeping the country, argues Allen. But what if it were more a case of a good number but nowhere near 50% of the country that feels the “Trumpist” way? After all, says Allen, both France and UK have such anti-immigrant, nationalist parties that get a decent but nowhere near a majority vote share. In any country which didn’t have a two-party system, would Trump have been told to get out of the Republican Party and go form a new party, wonders Allen.

Trump aside, Allen points to the fact that the non-whites in the US are increasing to a point whereby within a generation, they may be the new majority. At that point, would the US end up with more parties, simply because the goals of a diverse ethnic mix of whites and Hispanics becomes way too different to fall under just two parties’ umbrellas?

Further, will the Internet accelerate that trend by making it possible to know the diverging opinions of every not-so-significant number of people, wonders Eugene Wei:

“We already live in a generation where people feel comfortable making their views on everything under the sun public online, so I can't imagine it's a stretch to do so on political issues. The only thing stopping us from aggregating and organizing this information efficiently has been a focused, directed service.”

Besides, it’s already possible to mine Facebook data to check for whatever correlations you suspect might exist. Sure, today it might only yield very high level correlations like age or gender or job title or what other pages people like. Surely, a dedicated Internet service would only get better at this, says Wei:

“A network like this could unlock the potential for a more granular set of options.”

(More granular set of options = more parties).

Sound too far-fetched? Then again, as Wei reminds us:

“It's not unreasonable to imagine how quickly change like this can come to a particular space in public life when you compare how we used to shop, search and browse information, find people to date, or navigate from one place to another just a decade or two ago.”

So will the US become more like the UK, a country with more than two but still a small number of parties where one party still gets an absolute majority? Or will it become a coalition-is-the-only-way-to-get-a-majority mess like Japan and India (I still believe Modi’s 2014 absolute majority is an exception)? Or will the Americans find a way to make a coalition system work? Only time will tell.