Quick Take: Bipartisan Systems Are the Bane of Human History

Bipartisan systems optimize resources in a destructive way, as they create a just-big-enough majority with a just-scary-enough rival/enemy to beat, and they have been with us for ever

One of the strangest conspiracies in history revolves around one of the greatest works of literature, the Divine Comedy, and the conspirators have been convincing people, for centuries, that this narrative poem is about love and religion, when it’s all about bipartisan politics.

The book, completed around 1321, describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It represents the soul's journey towards God, with the author — Dante Alighieri — using three guides (the poet Virgil, the love interest Beatrice and a not-so-random sidekick, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux).

Lots of allegorical readings have been attached to this trip, which is mostly a kind of theological Apocalypse Now in which Dante very much enjoys the sight of his political enemies burning in Hell and his political friends frolicking in Paradise. Mind you: the book was simply titled “Comedia” by its author and it was only later editors who decided that it would work better as “Divina Comedia.”

The main thing to understand about Dante Alighieri is that he (like Bernard of Clairvaux, possibly the most shameless propagandist of papal power ever in history) was a Guelf, that is, a supporter of the Papacy against the Holy Roman Empire, a very hot issue in the 13th-14th century, but almost as confusing as our modern day Left-Right divide. In his youth, he hated, really hated those stupid assholes, the Ghibellines who supported the emperor in his disputes with the pope, which is the reason why Dante’s Hell is paved with famous Ghibellines of his era, and Dante can barely hide his satisfaction at the sight.

The political divide that excited Dante’s mind is very convoluted, however, which explains why some Guelfs burn in Hell too, giving the poem an air of beatific neutrality that allows the reader to concentrate on secondary considerations like style and theology.

Some Guelfs fell all the way to Hell, again, because of unavoidable bipartisan bickering: after the Guelfs won, they of course divided between White and Black Guelfs, and Dante sided with the Whites, ending up in exile after the Black Guelfs subsequently gained the upper hand. Those are the ones one sees burning.

There’s a reason why Dante found a way to sneak a few Ghibellines in Paradise too: near the end of his life, Dante took refuge at the Ghibelline court of Cangrande della Scala in Verona — so, as a sort of payment, the feudal lord and his family feature extravagantly in the poem’s section about Paradise¹.

The reality is that Dante’s dualistic political affiliations are not an exception in history. On the contrary, they are the rule. Many modern authors, especially Marxists, have obsessively looked for anachronistic hints that Christ was the first Communist, or Spartacus the first freedom fighter, or that ancient Spartans were the first Fascists.

This search has never really born fruit, because ancient societies, being slave-holding, didn’t contain the neat division between workers and capital-owners that appeared in the 19th century, inspiring the current left-right divide: Christ didn’t defend state ownership, Spartacus had no objections to slavery beyond preferring not to be a slave himself, and the Spartans were absolutely, unambiguously non-Fascist.

All the same, I’m pretty sure that the search will never stop, because people who look for such comparisons keep finding that, when one looks closely to all ancient societies, and even those not so ancient, one can very often see a defining feature of modern politics, repeated over and over again: bipartisan systems in which societies are neatly divided and form two opposing warring blocs. Think of ancient Rome, for example.

Republican Rome had various political divisions during its five centuries of existence, but these were always dualistic in nature. There never were three competing blocs in a complex triangular fight for power. At first, as far as we can tell, the dispute was patricians vs plebeians, and this later evolved into a fight between the landed gentry and mercantile interests (the most common sort of political divide in ancient Greece), before all of this tension was subsumed into the final fight between Populares (the Gaius Marius-Julius Caesar party) and Optimates (the Sulla-Pompey party).

This is not just a feature of European societies. In China, pretty detailed evidence from debates among court scholars and officials in the 1st century BC, shows that a division in two strong ideological poles is a historical global constant. Although China in this era had no way to take either oligarchic or democratic input into its policymaking, you still had two ideological blocs – one arguing for a complete set of policies, and the other for an opposite set of policies, with little ground in between.

For much of ancient Egyptian history, also in the absence of participatory politics, the divide was between supporters of royal power and supporters of priestly power; in India, the divide was between supporters and opponents of the Vedic tradition and the caste system it supported; later in China, it was Confucians against legalists and later against whoever wasn’t all that much in favor of Confucianism (Buddhists, modernizers, Manchu traditionalists); in Muslim caliphates, you had from very early on the opposition of Shia vs Sunni, and in Dante’s Medieval Europe that between Guelfs and Ghibellines and, when Ghibellines were soundly defeated, that between different Guelf factions that, once again, as ever, coalesced into opposing poles.

It’s pretty clear that, in every human society, political discussion optimizes for the creation of two blocs that simplify the issues at stake, and the bloc that secures the highest degree of cohesion wins. This is evident in every one of these historical examples. This was very evident to the US Founding Fathers, who strove to avoid the rise of political parties and political partisanship in their Republic, understanding perfectly well that such a road only led to a screaming fight between Fox News and MSNBC².

The counter to these arguments is that opposing blocs are historical constructs, simplifications that we build to explain complex phenomena that resist such reductive analysis. For example, there’s been a long-running debate among classicists, many of whom have pointed that none of the blocs in Roman history (patricians vs plebeians, landlords vs traders, Populares vs Optimates) really existed and they are simply a reductive view of a complex, vibrant, rich political tapestry in Rome.

The simplified answer to this is that modern politics are a complex, vibrant, rich, tapestry: Churchill was a liberal before he was a conservative, Reagan and Trump were Democrats and Dick freaking Cheney was a conservative almost his entire freaking life before he became a darling of the Left over the last few years.

We have just seen entire factions of the Republican Party, the Neocons and Never Trumpers, jump to the opposite party, the Democrats, for crying out loud. Of course boundaries are fluid and people are complicated and vindictive and they sometimes shoot their friends in the face. Does that mean that modern parties don’t exist either? Does it mean that nothing exists in politics other than an ungraspable complexity of unconnected things we mere humans are foolish to try and comprehend?

Is that the hill you’re willing to die on, the hill that is marked “Republicans and Democrats don’t exist, it’s all an illusion”? At this point in time precisely? That’s the view that Epicurus held, so no wonder that this guy is famous in modern times. But I will not accept the explanation that things are impossible to explain as an explanation.

Also, let me say that, after two decades as a correspondent, I‘m tired of hearing from people who think such and such third party in such and such country is going to change everything, so that this country’s politics will be much more complex and not a dualistic fight. If you know about British politics, you know exactly the party I’m talking about, old fellow. I don’t really need to spell it out.

In support of my point, let me cite this fascinating story by Matt Taibbi, which is a great example of what I’m talking about. In the story, Taibbi writes about documents just made public showing how groups aligned with the Democratic Party hit a third party rival, called No Labels, “with an array of underhanded schemes that put Watergate tricksters to shame.”

It’s not at all important that this is a story about Democratic operatives — including, yes, chief Never Trumper and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson — doing nefarious things to stop a third party from clipping Democratic wings. It just as easily could be a story about Republicans pulling every stop to destroy a neo-Trumpian movement ahead of the 2028 or 2032 election, and in fact it will almost certainly be in the future:

The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a “looming forest fire” that would be a “nuclear grade threat” if it nominated a candidate and reached a “live campaign environment.”

To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of “brand destruction,” using “controlled burns” to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be “burned to the fucking ground politically.”

…

Shortly after, on January 11th, 2024, No Labels — not aware yet that an “Anti-No-Labels Coalition” existed on paper — took the step of sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the activities of its opponents, highlighting a list of bizarre obstruction efforts like the fake site. Another episode involved a serving official, Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Bellows at the time had just made national headlines by declaring Donald Trump an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible for the ballot in her state (she would later be reversed by the Supreme Court). Bellows, like Emily Kane a Maine Democrat, took an extraordinary step in May 2023. She wrote to 6,500 Maine residents registered for No Labels, essentially to ask are you sure: “If you did not intend to enroll in the No Labels Party,” she wrote, “please be aware that you can change back.”

This is how humans optimize chances for victory: you build a coalition that gets 50.1% support. Every extra point is a waste of resources, which will weaken cohesion within your coalition because you will have fewer spoils to take from the defeated (be they real or ideological). Then you try to split the opposing coalition, but the opposition coalition will use the very same tricks on you, trying to get to 50.1% — and no more.

I’m not saying this is how things will always be. I’m saying this is how they have always been. We’re in the 21st century, we have information and past experience well beyond the wildest dreams of our predecessors. I’m sure we can do better than this endless return to dualism. But we can only do better if we change political systems so they reward, rather than penalize, political fragmentation.

1. Dante was such a sucker for politics and so prone to spreading misinformation about his political enemies that he’s responsible for a popular conspiracy theory of the 14th century. Building up on a troubadour song about Hughes Capet, the founder of the Capet dynasty in the 10th century, in the “Purgatorio” segment of the Comedia Dante spread the legend that France’s ruling family were descendants of a rich Paris butcher; his scholarship, to nobody’s surprise by this point I hope, was terrible: he conflated the first two Capets into one, all in the interest of scoring cheap political points against his later French enemies. In his biography of Dante, Marco Santagata (published in English), writes (pp. 6-7): ‘So far as his pride, even though Dante accuses himself of this sin, Boccaccio, like a scrupulous historian, requires the supporting evidence of “contemporaries,” namely of those who knew him in life. And he also cites oral testimony providing evidence of a negative side of Dante’s personality, that of “animosity,” which he is indeed ashamed to have to reveal. Boccaccio concludes that, if moved on points of politics, Dante would get angry until he lost his self- control, just like a “furious” madman—and sometimes for futile reasons.’ In his final years as a sort of unacknowledged born-again Ghibelline, ‘it was commonly said that Dante worked himself into such a state of anger if he heard a young woman or even a small boy speak ill of the Ghibellines that he’d throw stones at them if they didn’t stop…These outbursts, according to Boccaccio, were triggered by hatred of the Guelfs, who had thrown him out of Florence, a hatred which in response had turned him into a “proud Ghibelline.”’

2. Aaron Burr is largely responsible for the method by which Americans today elect their president. The constitution originally provided that voters would choose presidential electors from among their most well-informed neighbours of independent judgment, and that each elector would cast two votes for president, with the second-place finisher becoming vice president. But parties did quickly emerge, producing strange electoral results. The electors in 1796 chose John Adams, a leading Federalist (supporter of a strong central government), for president. Jefferson, his Republican (in favor of a weaker government) rival, came second, becoming vice president. Four years later, when Jefferson again sought the presidency, Burr became his running mate. A few Republican electors were supposed to cast their second ballots for someone other than Burr but apparently forgot, with the result that Jefferson and Burr received the same number of votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. To complicate matters further, each state, regardless of population, had one vote and states with delegations equally divided between the two parties couldn’t vote at all. After weeks of indecision, with Burr quietly intriguing for the presidency, Hamilton resolved the crisis by persuading enough Federalist members of Congress to abstain to secure Jefferson’s election. To avoid a future repeat of the electoral impasse, the Twelfth Amendment was added to the constitution, requiring the electors to make a distinct choice between president and vice president candidates. In effect, the constitution now recognized the existence of parties, or at least party tickets. Whether the revised system, which survives to this day, is an improvement is open to debate. As the London Review of Books eloquently wrote in 2017, “electors have long since been nothing but political functionaries whose votes reflect the will of the party.”