How the Tea Party Will Die

By Noah Feldman Oct 17, 2013 1:58 PM GMT-0400

All together now: We like democracy because ... why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it -- and why electoral democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?

There is an answer: Democracy is self-correcting, at least where it works. The key to the process is a version of supply and demand. When a politician acts in a way that doesn’t serve the voters’ interests or desires, demand for that person’s services should decline. Another candidate who fills the demand will get elected.

Some democratic systems do this at the level of the individual candidate, some at the level of the party. In a winner-take-all district-based system as in the U.S. Congress, the market is structured to drive elected officials toward the median voters in their districts, and a two-party system usually emerges. In a proportional-representation parliamentary system, the market allows for multiple niches of interest-based parties, which then form coalitions that satisfy their voters’ policy preferences.

So why isn’t the U.S. system working as it usually does to produce moderate elected officials? As recently as the 1990s, critics of two-party democracy charged that its virtue was actually a flaw: that the Democrats and Republicans were so similar as to be indistinguishable on core economic issues. The U.S., they charged, had no meaningful liberal (or conservative) option to satisfy the preferences of voters who wanted radical change.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-17/how-the-tea-party-will-die.html