Investigating the structural/legal peculiarities of political parties in US.

A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability” – if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem. One solution regularly proposed is that the left needs to break with the Democrats and build a third party. Rather than continuing to run candidates on the Democratic ballot line, the left should create its own party; such a party could endorse only candidates fully vetted by and accountable to the party membership, and could discipline candidates–even revoke their party membership–if they moved right in office.

This is an appealing idea. Unfortunately, here in the United States, creating a formal political party which exerts this kind of control over candidates is illegal.

Some people on the left wing of DSA argue that we need to form our own party so we can avoid candidate accountability issues like the ones they perceive in our relationship with AOC. But, as I have shown, this is exactly wrong: DSA can address candidate accountability issues only to the extent that it is not a formal political party. A formal political party would have no way of unendorsing someone like AOC.

This isn’t true in most countries. In the UK, for example, the national elected leadership of the Labour Party is perfectly capable of forbidding an individual from running for office as a Labour candidate; that’s what they did to Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party didn’t have to go to Corbyn’s district and door-knock, or drop a million-dollar independent expenditure on him, to knock him off the Labour line; they simply voted him off, as they had a perfect right to do. In most countries the idea that the elected leadership of a party can decide who runs on that party’s line seems quite natural–what else could it mean to have a political party?

But in the US, parties just aren’t allowed to do that—not the Democratic Party and not the Socialism Party. The Democratic Party can’t stop AOC (or Joe Lieberman, or Kyrsten Sinema, or Ilhan Omar) from running as a Democrat.

The question of why the US regulates political party selection of candidates down to the last detail would take us beyond the scope of this essay. Briefly, though, state regulation of parties is best seen as a reformist compromise ameliorating the anti-democratic effects of the two-party duopoly. In most countries, parties can choose candidates in any way they see fit, including in ways that exclude ordinary voters from having a voice. But the potentially undemocratic effects of these selection processes are mitigated by the fact that voters who don’t like the outcomes can split and form another party. In the US, our law on political parties reflects a judgment that voters can’t (as a practical matter) form a separate (viable) party, and so as a consolation prize we have the legal right to influence the candidate selection processes of the parties we’re stuck with.

In DSA and on the US left more broadly, when we argue about whether to use the Democratic Party ballot line or create our own ballot line so we can have a disciplined party, the debate is often over whether our own ballot line is a necessary condition for party discipline and coherence (“can we build a caucus of elected socialists if they’re elected on the Democratic line, or do we need our own line?”) That’s the wrong question. The right question is whether our own ballot line is even compatible with discipline and coherence (“can we maintain electoral unity when our decision-making process on who to back electorally is taken out of our hands, broken up across hundreds of districts and opened to anyone who wants to participate?”) and the answer is, obviously, no we can’t.

This is a double-edged sword for the left. On the one hand, we can’t build our own ballot-line party that enforces candidate discipline through collective decisions. But on the other hand, neither can “the” Democratic Party. “The” Democratic Party is legally bound to let us run on “their” ballot line in “their” internal (primary) elections. If they weren’t – if the laws were different – then we’d find it both necessary and also possible to form a ballot-line third party. As things stand, it is not necessary and also not possible.

None of this is to say that we can stop worrying about candidate accountability and party discipline. The absence of real, disciplined political parties is a colossal problem in US politics; not only does it confront the socialist left with the constant threat of political co-optation, but the very same issue makes it enormously difficult for even moderate Democrats to enact their political agenda. One need think only of the fate of Biden’s very progressive domestic agenda in 2021-22 at the hands of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The lack of a framework for meaningfully accountable electoral representation in the US is a huge barrier to enacting not only radical but even moderate reforms.

But the left is deluded if it believes that forming a new ballot-line political party will help overcome this barrier. Realistic efforts to address the problem of party accountability and discipline must begin from the observation that these characteristics, which are intrinsic features of formal political parties in most democracies, are incompatible with formal political partyhood in the US.