Is the two-party system broken? pass.

Brad DeLong offers a dissenting voice from the enthusiasm we’ve been seeing (and voicing ourselves) about Ehrenreich:

I agree that Barbara Ehrenreich is a very smart and graceful writer, a keen analyst of American culture and society–she is worth, say, ten of David Brooks. But her brand of left-wing politics is an infantile disorder. Left-wing politics is, for her, primarily a means of self-expression. The point is not to actually do anything to make the United States or the world a better place–not to actually help people make better lives for themselves by improving the enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act or to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or to raise the minimum wage or to improve Medicaid coverage.

My response overlaps a fair bit with Kevin Drum’s; this is an entirely unfair line of attack on someone who is a political writer and critic, and not a policy wonk. Besides, the studied dispassionate centrism of policy wonkishness sure looks like a form of self-expression as well, at least from my angle.

On the other hand, I thought the 2000 pro-Nader column DeLong digs up is pretty embarrassing for Ehrenreich, and helps him make his point.

What’s of interest to me, however, is the conversation sparked by the pro-Nader column. Matthew Yglesias calls it the most coherent pro-Nader argument he’s ever heard, but only if you accept the premise that the two party system is fundamentally broken, which he finds absurd beyond reason.

Henry Farrell, on the other hand, finds the premise that the two party system is fundamentally broken quite correct.

So who’s right, Ehrenreich/Farrell or Yglesias/DeLong? My politics certainly lie closer to the former, but I’m not going to take sides here. Instead, I’m going to reject the question as simplistic and nonsensical.

The question Is the two-party system/US political system fundamentally broken? contains an assumption that it’s supposed to do certain, particular agreed upon things. This is true in the broad sense, but it a more accurate sense, there is very little agreement on what the government should be doing and how responsive it should be to public opinion, demands for justice (of various sorts), rights violations, protecting and/or disrupting the status quo, and so on.

It does some of the things some people expect it to do reasonably well, others rather poorly, and many, many others somewhere in-between. In this sense, it’s not dissimilar from other large, complex, multi-layered embedded institutions. To try to cram an institution of this magnitude into a analytic container labelled “broken” or “not broken” is to misunderstand the nature of such institutions.

Note: All this doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable to debate the merits of using the vote as a form of symbolic dissent. I’m primarily objecting to the rather hopeless (in my view) way the debate is being framed here.