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This November's U.S. presidential election is supposed to be the one that decides whether Americans will continue to live in a democracy—whether because a reelected Donald Trump will end voting forever, or because a reelected Joe Biden will import millions of illegal immigrants and reassign Border Patrol to hand them voter registration forms as they cross the Rio Grande.
These predictions are, to put it mildly, a bit farfetched. But that doesn't mean the democratic mechanisms within the American political process are safe and sound. Rather, in their scramble to "save democracy" from each other, both major parties are quietly sacrificing the few means voters have of influencing the process.
In theory, political parties are responsive to the American people both in how they select a nominee and how they write their platform. The party convention is supposed to be the ultimate reflection of that accountability: the delegates elected during state primaries—grassroots party members' direct representatives—get to vote on the nominee and on proposed changes to the party's policy platform. That way, when the general election comes, people will know both which candidates and which policies they're voting for, and will have had a hand in choosing them.
This cycle, however, both party conventions—the Republicans', which is currently underway, and the Democrats' next month—are showcasing the opposite. Party leaders are taking steps to remove their internal democratic mechanisms, sideline their own voters, and turn their conventions into coronations of nominee and platform alike.
Despite recent murmurs about replacing the incumbent, and overwhelming discontent among their voters, the Democrats have given themselves no choice but to renominate Biden in August. Party leadership enforced uniform pro-Biden messaging for so long that it missed its best chance—a contested primary, decided by the voters—to replace him. And the identity of the nominee, and his Republican opponent, have entirely overshadowed any discussion of actual policy. Remarkably, Joe Biden's official campaign website did not even have an "issues" page until the day of his ill-fated debate, just three weeks ago.
The Democrats' behavior this cycle is remarkably similar to what Republicans did in 2020. That year, the GOP convention was little more than a coronation of the incumbent Trump, and the party put forward no platform. It was a TV show, designed around showcasing the talents of the party's rising young guns—like Madison Cawthorn, Dana White, and Kevin McCarthy.
Unlike in 2020, this year the GOP put forward a platform, but only after drastically and unilaterally rewriting it ahead of the convention. Eschewing the customary public hearings that allow ordinary voters a degree of input, party leaders wrote the new platform on their own, behind closed doors. The speeches introducing it at the convention underscored repeatedly that it had been "personally reviewed, edited and reviewed" by the nominee. Most notably, the platform removed almost all statements related to abortion. Under the new language, it does not even propose trying to reduce or regulate the practice. The document simply says that the party approves of state-level votes on the issue—and it implies that such votes (even those resulting in the full deregulation of abortion) completely satisfy the 14th Amendment's protection of citizens' right to life. Judging by the new platform alone, one would hardly get the impression that Republicans think there is anything remotely problematic about abortion.
The Republican Party's platform changes are tantamount to a complete reversal on an enormous issue. And that should be concerning, whatever one thinks about abortion. This party apparatus is apparently willing and able to change its mind on a dime, on an important issue, apparently without input from its constituents. At the very least, it raises the question of why vote for that party at all—can you ever know what you'll get from it?
In both cases, the parties' unwillingness to consult their own voters is a matter of political expediency. For the Democrats, the theory is that allowing someone to primary a sitting president would be a sign of weakness. And there is no way to give that choice back to voters. Even if a change in candidate does come, at this point, it can only come as a result of closed-door meetings between party officials and donors.
For Republicans, the platform change is about instituting a quiet pivot on an issue they no longer know how to message on—and perhaps never did, apart from repeating "return it to the states" as a mantra. Even before the platform bait-and-switch, leading Republicans spent months promoting IVF, and frantically reversed their positions on abortion leading up to the convention. Now they're daring what has become a highly reliable constituency to defect and, frankly, pro-lifers should do just that.
This trend is a far bigger threat to democracy than the results of any one presidential election. After all, what good is a choice between two candidates if voters—even party members so committed that they volunteer to be delegates at a convention—have no say in who those candidates are, or what policies they'll pursue? "Democracy" has to mean more than checking a box or hole-punching a card, if it means anything at all.
It's not clear what, if anything, voters could do to meaningfully pressure the main parties to restore the internal democratic mechanisms they're now stripping away. Obviously the threatened loss of donor funding would spur change, but that's hardly democratic. Perhaps this is a good year to vote third party, or to only vote on down-ballot races.
From a historical perspective, though, we may be simply overdue for a more radical change. The "first party system," defined by the tug-of-war between Federalists and anti-Federalists, lasted about 30 years, from George Washington's presidency to the 1824 election. The "second party system" was similarly short-lived, extending until the collapse of the Whigs and the founding of the Republican Party in the 1850s. It's been Republicans versus Democrats ever since. The American system has survived—and indeed, benefitted from—major party breakups in the past. The consistent theme of this year's conventions is that the parties are not only diminishing present possibilities for voter input—they are squandering their own institutional legitimacy, and hastening the arrival of something new.
Philip Jeffery is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
