One paradox of American politics is that voters are both extremely polarized about politics and extremely disdainful of political parties. A record share, 43 percent, self-identify as political independents. Most of these are not true swing voters, but they hold both major parties in low regard. As of September, only 40 percent of voters approved of the ruling Republican Party. The Democrats’ favorability was an even more miserable 37 percent—barely above their July showing, their worst in more than 30 years.
The parties themselves look feeble and vulnerable to capture—by opportunistic candidates, attention-seeking infotainers, and parochial activists. Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party is nearly a decade old. More than 60 percent of Americans want a third major party to emerge, even if the structure of the country’s political system makes that prohibitively difficult.
Reformers reason that by importing features of other democracies—a direct popular vote for president, tight limits on money in politics, voting by ranked choice—we could heal ourselves.
If only it were so simple. In democracies all across the world, the party system appears unhealthy: Trust in parties is low, partisan antagonism is high, and elections feel existential instead of routine. Many countries’ equivalents of the Democrats and Republicans—parties that have been dominant at least since World War II—are suffering similar decline. Some are on the precipice of extinction. Populist parties are ascending seemingly everywhere.
The synchronized collapse of mainstream parties around the world shows that what is happening in America is unexceptional—and, as a result, that many prominent theories for the American electorate’s malaise and discontent are incomplete. Some argue that America should remove the impediments to legislating and become more like the United Kingdom, where the prime minister always possesses a parliamentary majority. Or the U.S. could end gerrymandering and first-past-the-post voting by moving to a system of proportional representation, as in Germany, where parliamentary seats are awarded proportionately to vote share. Or America could end the Electoral College and elect its president by popular vote, like France, perhaps with a runoff round to avoid spoilers. Or maybe Americans’ discontent would end if their country became a Scandinavian-style social democracy where aggressive taxation and welfare spending reduced income inequality.
These all might be improvements. Yet European democracies with all of these features have been immune to populism. “All the solutions you think could be applied in the U.S. have been tried and shown to fail in different European countries,” Christopher Bickerton, a professor of modern European politics at Cambridge University, told me. “There is no panacea.” Bickerton pointed out that multiparty democracies are better able to delay populists from coming into power by refusing to accept them in governing coalitions, but even this tactic looks less and less tenable. Whatever has gone wrong has gone wrong everywhere.
[Marc Novicoff: Democrats don’t seem willing to follow their own advice]
Look at the U.K., whose own duopoly of the Labour and Conservative Parties—which have dominated for the past century—is collapsing. The current Labour government is appallingly unpopular because it has little idea of what to do with the power it gained after 14 years of Tory rule. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has a net approval rating of –45 percent, and more than half of British voters say he should resign. If a parliamentary election were held today, the populist-right Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, would almost certainly control the government. The primary instigator of Brexit would then be rewarded with the country’s leadership.
In France, the two most powerful factions of the Fifth Republic were once the Socialists and the Republicans, whom Emmanuel Macron first upended launching his own centrist party and capturing the presidency in 2017. Their demise is not reversing anytime soon. In the most recent presidential election, held in 2022, the combined vote tally for the Socialist and Republican candidates in the first round was less than 7 percent. Over two decades, Marine Le Pen’s populist-right National Rally has moved from the fringe of French politics to the cusp of controlling government: Polls for the next elections, to be held in 2027, show that the party is now favored to win the presidency.
In Germany, a February election was a terrible showing for the traditionally dominant Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party. Friedrich Merz, the current German chancellor, has cobbled together a narrow majority without populist parties of either the left or the right. Even so, Merz failed to win confirmation on his first vote and needed to convene a second one—an embarrassing start to his chancellorship that none of his predecessors had endured. His approval rate now is only 25 percent. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is, for now, cordoned off from government. But it managed to get 21 percent of the vote in the recent election, double its level in 2021. Recent polls show that it has grown even stronger since then.
In the Netherlands, the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration Party for Freedom actually won a plurality of votes in the 2023 elections, but its leader, Geert Wilders, was ultimately thwarted from becoming prime minister. In Scandinavia, cradle-to-grave welfare states where income inequality is low have not staved off the rise of populist parties. Quite the opposite: In Sweden, the anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats are the second-largest party in Parliament and are propping up the current minority government with their votes. A populist-right party is in the governing coalition in Finland.
A similar phenomenon has taken hold outside Europe too. In recent Japanese elections, the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party lost its parliamentary majority. An upstart nationalist party called Sanseito, which rails against immigration and pledges to put the “Japanese first,” has made significant gains. This is despite the fact that only 3 percent of Japanese residents are foreign born.
E. E. Schattschneider, one of the most influential political scientists of the mid-20th century, once wrote that “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties. As a matter of fact, the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime.” By that score, the current nature of the party regime is faithless, fragmented, and febrile. Voters are less committed to parties, angrier at their fellow citizens, and quicker to become disgruntled with government. The ascendant parties—the MAGA version of the Republican Party, Britain’s Reform, France’s National Rally, and the German AfD—present themselves as preservers of national culture from immigration, globalization, and the corrupt and decadent elites of the old mainstream parties. This unwinding is the result of deeper forces, social and economic transformations that have unmoored the old mass parties of left and right.
Some saw it coming. In his posthumous 2013 book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, the Irish political scientist Peter Mair offers a stirring warning: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” Mair argues that the void in democracy was opening up for two reasons. First, political elites and ordinary citizens began to pull apart from one another. The resultant “widening gap between rulers and ruled has facilitated the often strident populist challenge that is now a feature of many advanced European democracies,” Mair writes, several years before Brexit and the contemporary populist ascendance. The second reason the democratic void grew was technocracy, which put policy decisions beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. Particularly consequential was the “deepening of European integration,” which left citizens beholden to “being governed by bodies that are neither representative nor properly accountable.” Years later, amid surges in migration from Syria and North Africa, the inability of European countries to set their own migration policies fueled populist backlash everywhere.
[From the November 2025 Issue: America needs a mass movement—now]
For years after World War II, party competition was on the familiar axis of left versus right, primarily over the proper distribution of economic growth among labor and capital. The dominant parties that emerged were mass ones. Those of the left were deeply enmeshed in the labor movement: The German Social Democratic Party was rooted in Marxist organizing; the British Labour Party was founded and effectively controlled by the trade unions; the Democratic Party’s most important power brokers were union bosses such as Walter Reuther and George Meany. Many parties on the right, meanwhile, were grounded in churches and, like the “fusion conservatives” who dominated America in the Reagan era and the Christian Democrats in Germany, were further bound by their fervent opposition to communism.
These foundations eroded. Unionization declined across the advanced world as capitalism went postindustrial. Voters became more secular; the Soviet Union’s collapse banished the specter of communism. “The party as a mass organization is now a distant memory,” Didi Kuo, a political scientist at Stanford, writes in her book The Great Retreat. The result, Kuo writes, was that parties “disengaged from civil society and were better described as partnerships of professionals than as associations of citizens.”
Some experts hoped that the new administrative state could permanently solve the tensions between elites and the general public. In the 1960 book The End of Ideology, the sociologist Daniel Bell argues that growing professionalism of government and the emergence of the welfare state as a third way between capitalism and communism would reduce radicalism and political conflict. The thesis was immensely influential.
But others doubted that political conflict could be so neatly defused. In 1965, the Yale political theorist Robert Dahl warned that the “new democratic Leviathan” could generate an alienation of its own kind because it would be seen “as too remote and bureaucratized, too addicted to bargaining and compromise, too much an instrument of political elites and technicians.” In the 1970s, the social scientist Ronald Inglehart developed his theory of postmaterialism: As booming economic growth made the material conflicts of the left and the right less salient, people would place greater emphasis on abstract concerns such as identity, self-actualization, gender roles, and diversity. These new “cultural cleavages aren’t something to do with one individual leader; they’re much more structural in nature,” Pippa Norris, a political scientist who worked closely with Inglehart before his death, in 2021, told me. “But parties are also somewhat like ocean liners. They change slowly.”
Postmaterialist values help explain the new axis of politics: not old left-right disputes between labor and capital but over national sovereignty, cultural preservation, and an abstract sense of belonging. The parties of the left have a new base of support, not among the working classes but among the highly educated knowledge workers who are cosmopolitan and socially progressive. The parties of the right, meanwhile, are attracting support from the less-educated workers who were not the winners of globalization.
The French economist Thomas Piketty has described the two camps as the “Brahmin left” and the “Merchant right”; he and two collaborators have documented that this pattern of education polarization from the postwar period to the present day is observable in more than 20 democracies. Immigration, particularly the unauthorized kind, aggravates this divide even further. “In Europe at least, immigration is a double threat because it poses both labor-market competition and it really stresses an already fraying welfare state,” Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, told me. “The mainstream parties have not formulated a response, and that, of course, opens the space for right-wing populists who are more than happy to say, ‘Get rid of them all.’”
Although American politics has been reshaped, as elsewhere, by similar forces—the rise of educational polarization, the decline of industrialism, the atomization and anomie wrought by the internet—the peculiarities of our election system mean that the democratic void looks different here than in Europe. Our major-party duopoly is much more thoroughly entrenched—because of first-past-the-post voting that discourages wasting votes on third-party candidates, an Electoral College that awards votes on a winner-take-all basis, and the colossal paperwork requirements of trying to run in 50 states with very different ballot-access laws. As a result, populist factions do not form new parties, as they would in Europe, but burrow themselves within the existing Democratic and Republican firmament.
[J.J. Gould: Why is populism winning on the American right?]
Why this strategy succeeds is best described by the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld in their book The Hollow Parties, published last year. By hollow parties, they mean that Democrats and Republicans are merely “hard shells, marked with the scars of interparty electoral conflict” that “cover disordered cores, devoid of concerted action and positive loyalties.” They are overshadowed by satellite groups, called the “party blob.” State and local parties are left in shambles because organizing and fundraising happens digitally. “Hollow parties lack legitimacy,” Schlozman and Rosenfeld write. “The mass public and engaged political actors alike share neither positive loyalty to their allied party nor deference to the preferences of its leaders.” The bulk of American voters are left irritated and indifferent; they are beset by hardened factions of what the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists”—the people who consume partisan news, donate money to campaigns, and perpetrate various acts of digital activism. The steady demise of mainstream parties has meant that politics is no longer participatory; it is parasocial.
If parties are—like the people they represent—starved of genuine connection, then what can be fixed? The economy will not revert to industrialism; communications will remain instant and internet-mediated. Depending on your political persuasion, you might argue that more growth is needed, or less income inequality. But Americans are significantly richer than Europeans, and the Europeans are significantly more egalitarian than Americans. Neither seems particularly content. Plenty of people can hope to undo long-running declines in union membership, religiosity, and social trust—but they should not be optimistic. Instead, parties will need to reinvent themselves for the postindustrial, postmaterial age. This is painful, but not impossible.
In America, this process of reformation has happened repeatedly before. The Progressive Era was a response to widespread anger at the prevailing order. Figures such as William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat, channeled the rage of rural America against the railroad trusts and the gold standard. The major parties eventually accommodated these complaints: A progressive Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, would establish the first system of antitrust regulation. Another progressive president, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, would form the modern administrative state.
The new populism era poses a similar challenge not just to the Democrats and the Republicans but to the previously dominant parties everywhere. This time the rage is about maintaining some semblance of order and control in a time of head-spinning change—over whether the promises of the welfare state can be kept, whether immigration is under sufficient control, whether national cultures can be preserved amid the din of globalization.
Postmaterial needs are more difficult to address than the materialist demands of past bouts of populism were. But if the major parties don’t wish to die, they will have to adapt.
The post The Strange Demise of Mainstream Parties appeared first on The Atlantic.
