America is a Bear in a Trap

How to free America from the trap of an election system captured by party processes gone wrong.

“A good way to understand our current predicament as Americans is to imagine that we are a bear in the woods being attacked by hungry wolves. And our paw is caught in a trap. And a furnace of a wildfire is raging our way.”

This essential first step of Danielle Allen’s “Democracy Renovation Agenda” explains the trap America is caught in— and how we can free ourselves.

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America is a Bear in a Trap

Table of Contents:

I— America as a Bear in a Trap

II— How to Free the Bear

III— Don’t Be Afraid to Free the Bear

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I

America as a Bear in a Trap

The U.S. Congress has lost legislative supremacy.

A good way to understand our current predicament as Americans is to imagine that we are a bear in the woods being attacked by hungry wolves. And our paw is caught in a trap. And a furnace of a wildfire is raging our way.

The wolves are politicians. Some are gray, some are black, but wolves are wolves. We are all of us, together, that bear. It doesn’t matter what side of America’s yawning political divide you stand on. Both sides feel like they’re being attacked by wolves.

And so we are driven to close ranks. As of July, Gallup reported, a gob-smacking 93 percent of Republicans approve of the job that President Donald Trump is doing. Just 4 percent of Democrats did. Such a historically wide gulf tells us that each side fears it will get torn apart whenever the other side is in charge.

One side feels the shredding of safety nets, federal programs, and commitments to inclusion and honest history. The other side feels the destruction of traditional family mores, religion, and parental control.

Every two years, Americans spend an average of about $15 billion on campaign advertising trying to fend off the wolves attacking them. But we just end up changing which wolves are briefly ascendant.

Meanwhile, flames are bearing down on us from the edge of the forest. The wildfire is global economic turbulence fueled by, first, globalization (and now de-globalization) and, second, technological transformation. Both of these are also fueling climate change and historically unprecedented levels of human migration, which in turn sparks cultural destabilization in societies around the globe. Not to mention how economic turbulence shows up at home: our nationwide housing crisis.

Maybe we could fend off those wolves once and for all and also do something about the flames — if we could just get our foot out of that dang trap.

But what’s the trap?

The trap is an election system that has been captured by party processes gone wrong. We’ve had decades of changes — some of them well-intentioned, some about accruing power — to how our political parties operate. They have left us in a place where most members of Congress are elected by only 5 to 8 percent of the electorate in their districts. The combination of gerrymandering and low-turnout primaries means that as long as a candidate appeals to the most intense and active members of their partisan base, they can sail into office. After that, the incumbency advantage insulates them even more.

Our members of Congress don’t work for us. They don’t work for the bulk of Americans — most of whom, these days, are independent, not registered in a party. They work for that 5 to 8 percent sliver of partisans. Their incentive is always to keep their base happy. And so they have little reason to make deals that would compromise the ideological positions for which they were elected.

Presto. You’ve got a Congress so split along ideological lines that only very rarely can it get any legislation past the Senate filibuster. And what does a dysfunctional Congress give you? A power vacuum. Also, a frustrated, anxious public. We do, after all, have problems that need attention. Remember that wildfire?

What happens when Congress stops legislating and leaves a power vacuum? Well, the executive will fill it.

Since FDR, over the course of the 20th century, the power of the president has only grown, but that growth accelerated with our last two presidents. Joe Biden leaned into the covid emergency to cancel student loans, require covid vaccinations, and extend a ban on apartment evictions, which Chris DeMuth has written well about.

Now, thanks to Project 2025, a theory of a unitary executive on steroids, and an assist from the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, we have a president who is governing by executive order to an unprecedented degree. Some of the wolves are acting like wolves not just because they’re out for themselves but to do the bidding of an overgrown presidency.

Back in England in the 1760s and 1770s, the complaint in London was that Parliament had lost legislative supremacy. That is why people began to call King George III a tyrant.

The U.S. Congress has lost legislative supremacy.

The American people, together, are strong as a bear. Stronger than all the wolves, faster than wildfire. But we are caught in a trap. The trap we’re in is that our national legislature no longer works for the American people as a whole.

Now, if you’re a bear in the woods, being attacked by wolves, with your paw in a trap, and a wildfire is bearing down on you, what would you do? Or ask it this way: if you were Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and your character had become a bear in the woods, being attacked by wolves, with your foot in a trap, etc. etc., what would you do?

You’d take a few wolf bites and concentrate with all your might on getting your foot out of the dang trap.

But what are we actually doing?

Pouring $15 billion into wolf defense, over and over, every time an election comes around.

Do you want to pay for wolf defense forever? Do you want to just swap which wolves lead the pack every two years? Wouldn’t the better way to solve our problems, the first step to beating back the wolves once and for all, be to get our foot out of that trap? Are you wondering how we could do that?

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II

How to Free the Bear

To get ourselves, America, out of the trap we’re in, we have to change the operating conditions for our parties.

We last left our bear under attack by wolves in the woods, with a wildfire fast approaching, and its paw snared in a nasty trap. Let’s now take a closer look at that trap, which has been created by the fact that our political institutions are controlled by two exceptionally unhealthy parties. The trap is cutting deeper with every passing day, especially with the mutually assured destruction of new rounds of gerrymandering kicked off this summer by Republicans in Texas.

To slip the trap, we have to transform our sharp-toothed, wired-to-snap major parties into healthy political associations.

The terrible thing about our current situation is that the Democrats and Republicans have both learned that declines in membership needn’t diminish their ability to win control of the nation’s institutions. In 2004, according to Gallup, 34 percent of Americans considered themselves Republican, 34 percent considered themselves Democrats, and 31 percent considered themselves independent. Now 28 percent consider themselves Republican, 28 percent consider themselves Democrat, and 43 percent consider themselves independent.

But has the power of the parties shrunk with the public’s declining affiliation with them? Not at all. Thanks to gerrymandering and low-turnout primaries, each of America’s two major parties can control the most powerful nation on earth with less than one-third of the population calling the party home. Every year, our two parties get better at claiming ever more power for a continuously shrinking membership base.

Year after year, in every state, taxpayers keep paying for party primaries, even though party enrollment keeps shrinking. The Republicans and Democrats are like companies with a declining customer-base but a guaranteed revenue stream, thanks to American taxpayers. This is corruption of the worst kind, because it distorts the fundamental distribution of power in our system of self-governance. Political scientist Lee Drutman has called this the two-party doom-loop — a terrible duopoly that has taken possession of our political institutions.

How can the doom-loop be broken? These problems with the parties have generated two reform strategies in democracy renovation circles.

One set of reformers seeks to end the two-party doom-loop by encouraging the formation of new parties and minor parties. Some even would like to see the kind of multi-party landscape that operates in European parliamentary systems. For this group, ranked-choice voting or fusion ballots like New York uses are the necessary solutions.

A second set of reformers takes an anti-party position, wishing to see parties diminished, to be replaced by centrist, problem-solving politicians who are able to forge bridge-building coalitions. This group often advocates for open or nonpartisan primaries, which are already common across the country in municipal elections. In these races, all candidates run on the same first ballot, and then some number of finalists moves on to the general election. These reformers hope for the America George Washington dreamed of — a land without factions.

In my view, neither dream is realistic nor matches the necessities either of democratic politics in general or American politics in particular.

Parties are necessary for healthy democracies. They are mediating organizations that connect people at the local level to larger national issues, and they serve as information clearinghouses. They simplify for ordinary citizens the job of thinking about the many issues a citizen might want to weigh in determining their vote.

But America will never settle permanently into a European-style multi-party system. The combination of federalism and our elected executive will continually drive our politics toward a two-party equilibrium. The story of the 19th century reflects the natural state of our institutions. Two major parties emerge for a time; then they split, or else minor parties emerge, and the country goes through a period of realignment — as when the Republicans emerged from the Whigs — and eventually the chaos of multi-parties resolves back to two dominant parties.

The 20th century hasn’t seen similar alternation between two dominant parties, of course. But this is because beginning at the end of the 19th century, the Democrats and Republicans began passing laws at the state level to make it much, much harder for new parties to form. Like any other monopolists, they acted to protect their turf.

In the early 19th century, parties formed simply by organizing—by groups of people coming together to develop and execute a shared agenda. But then states set a minimum number of votes required for a party to maintain its status. Running a political party became a state-regulated activity, and diverse rules proliferated around the country. Today, to function nationally a new party must master 50 different sets of procedures. This remains a serious barrier even for well-known parties that have existed for decades. Founded in 1971, the Libertarian Party did not achieve ballot access in all 50 states until 2012. The Green Party, founded in 1984, has so far achieved ballot access in only 44 states.

To get ourselves, America, out of the trap we’re in, we have to change the operating conditions for our parties. They need incentives to work for the American people, not just for themselves and their shrinking number of members.

I am pro-party. I believe democracies need mediating organizations. But two reforms are needed to steer our parties toward health.

First, we need to abolish party primaries. Parties should have to compete for the whole electorate, rather than being able to claim power based on low-turnout, gerrymandered primaries.

Second, the barriers to entry for new parties need to be lowered.

Across the land, in as many states as possible, we should abolish taxpayer-funded party primaries. In their place, taxpayers should fund an all-party primary. All candidates from all parties should run on the same first ballot so the parties are forced to compete for the whole electorate at every turn. Then the top vote-getters can go on to a final round.

Four states already work this way: Louisiana, California, Washington, and Alaska. In the first three states, two finalists go on to the final round. In Alaska, four finalists move on and voters get to use ranked-choice voting – using their ballot to indicate their first, second and third choice -- in the general round.

Candidates from these states span the political spectrum. This reform seems to have brought Washington State a somewhat more progressive politics, while California has seen some moderation (possibly also the result of independent redistricting there). Louisiana and Alaska are both more conservative. But the overall result is clear: Across the spectrum, these states have politicians who are more willing to make deals across party lines. They don’t have to live with the fear of being primaried for stepping out of line. And deal-making is good for doing work for America.

We need more states free of the bear trap of party primaries. Two more — Massachusetts and Oklahoma — are working on getting similar reforms through. Both states have coalitions that have recently filed ballot initiatives to bring an all-party primary to their state, with the top two vote-getters going on to the final round.

In addition to these features, in Massachusetts at least, some of the nitty-gritty details of the initiative should also make it easier for minor parties to compete. Parties can still hold endorsement conventions and candidates can carry those endorsements on the ballot. They can even carry more than one endorsement. Imagine a ballot where you have a Republican candidate with a Republican Party endorsement; a Republican candidate with a Libertarian Party endorsement; a Democratic candidate with the Democratic Party endorsement; a Democratic candidate with a Working Families Party endorsement; an Independent candidate, and so on. Also, by using the primary election as the vote base for determining whether a party wins major party status, the barrier to entry into our politics is lowered.

An important point that is central to the mission of The Renovator: Frequently people think that democracy renovation is a long-term game, but that’s wrong. Every two years, we have a chance to change the rules that govern how our parties operate. In each election cycle, achieving all the change that we can to our party system is absolutely as urgent as fending off the wolves we fear the most. If we can clean up our party system a bit every two years, eventually we will have re-domesticated those wolves, turning them back into sled-dogs pulling together for the whole American people.

So if you’re gearing up for wolf-defense, preparing to spend more money than you should on oodles of congressional candidates, consider rebalancing your democracy portfolio. Shift at least some of your attention to the trap we’re in and how we can escape it. Find ways to support the efforts in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, and find ways to inspire similar efforts in other states. In November 2026, we have a chance to expand the number of states who have slipped the trap of our unhealthy party structures from four to six.

At the end of the day, it boils down to this: We’ll get our foot out of the trap when we get rid of party primaries. And it will help to flip the script on gerrymandering.

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III

Don’t Be Afraid to Free the Bear

The trap we’re in is not merely the institutional problem of party primaries. It is also fear of our fellow citizens.

If you’re a bear in the woods, being attacked by wolves, with your paw in a trap and a wildfire raging toward you, and someone tells you, “Ok, the way you get out of the trap is by getting rid of party primaries,” you are unlikely to spring into immediate action to get rid of party primaries.

There are lots of reasons why. There are still those wolves attacking you, after all, and their bites are excruciating. For instance, maybe you run a labor union, and your members’ jobs are being hacked away by AI. You might reasonably think, I must devote every ounce of energy I have to fighting off this threat. You would not be wrong.

But here is another question to consider: Would you have a better chance of reining in the power of big tech if you could turn toward democratic institutions that were not captured by parties that have been captured by big money, including tech money, but that instead actually work for the whole American people? If another weapon of self-defense — through reform to political primaries — is within reach, maybe it makes sense to grab it?

Or maybe the wildfire makes you think, “What is the point anyway? Even if I could get my paw out of this trap, is there anything that can be done about the wildfire?” The wildfire is enormous global forces — globalization (and now deglobalization) and technological transformation, which have in turn spurred climate change and historic migration — that would place pressure on even the healthiest democratic system

Maybe you’re a young person who has already decided not to have kids because of climate change, or maybe you’re one of the terrifyingly growing number of young people experiencing suicidal ideation. You’ll need to believe that the future can be saved — that we can beat back the wildfire.

But the most paralyzing question of all is this: “Hey, if getting America’s paw out of the trap means getting rid of party primaries, and if that means politicians always have to campaign to the whole electorate, won’t they be less responsive to my particular needs and the needs of my community?”

This is a question that often comes from people who believe so much in democracy that they participate vigorously in our existing institutions, including our current primary system. Which means they have correctly observed that sometimes the small turnout in a party primary makes it easier to overcome an incumbent politician and elevate a new voice in our politics.

We need to acknowledge that our most activist lovers of democracy draw some real benefit from the current system. As a former head of the Democratic National Committee once quipped to me, “Democrats don’t actually care how many people vote; they only care how people vote — there could be five people in the electorate, as long as three of them vote Democrat.” Republicans feel pretty much the same way. And after all, since the number of members the parties have doesn’t currently impact their degree of control over our institutions, why not let membership shrink, to have a more cost-effective route to power?

The most powerful force in the universe may be not gravity or compound interest but negative partisanship: In our community, this can be expressed as a belief that a reform cannot be good for me if it is also good for my political opponents. Power corrupts, and it can even take its toll on lovers of democracy, who sometimes think that the steel trap may not be so bad if they can figure out how to take advantage of it. Maybe swing it around with that injured paw to beat back the other side’s wolves? Find a way to brandish it to give an advantage to the set of wolves that (sometimes) helps you?

In Massachusetts, 64 percent of our voters are not enrolled in any political party. Over the past decade, across both primary and general elections, we’ve had only one candidate in 52 percent of races. With such a low degree of competitiveness in our elections, it’s impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. No surprise, then, that we have one of the least effective and least transparent state legislatures in the country on standard metrics. Our turnout rates have been on a steady decline for years.

Those of us seeking to replace Massachusetts’ party primaries with an all-party primary via a November 2026 ballot initiative has been building a cross-ideological coalition (I’m part of the coalition’s leadership) — with progressives, centrist Democrats, pro-democracy Republicans and third-party leaders all having signed on. This is because the reform really is good for everyone.

Here’s why all-party primaries are the key to breaking free of the bear trap: If we are successful at establishing them here in my state, more people will be able to run on the primary ballot. Voters will routinely have actual choices, not the sparse subset of candidates one of the major parties puts forward. Public debate will be improved. Challengers will have a better chance of winning. Incumbents will be rewarded for figuring out how to work for and run in relationship to the whole electorate. Democrats will see more general election races pitting two Democratic candidates against each other, restarting the engine of ideas for the party. Republicans will see less blocking of pro-democracy Republican candidates in the primary process. Third-party candidates will have more opportunities to carry their message and potentially breakthrough.

In short, all-party primaries put the whole electorate back in the driver seat. Yes, this does mean that, if you’re an activist with a cause, you’ll have to make your case to everyone. It won’t be possible to slip something through just with a sliver of the voters. But it seems to me that if one prefers the party primary process as it currently exists for getting one’s causes through, that suggests a surprising lack of confidence in the value of one’s policies for society as a whole.

Because if a policy is good for the broad community, then one should be able to win elections by advocating for it.

This does not mean, of course, that democratic majorities are always right, but only that we should have confidence in being able to work with our fellow citizens. Democratic theorists have been worried about the tyranny of the majority since at least James Madison. Strong rights protections and fair courts are necessary. Yet the election system must be tethered to the whole people — that is the purpose of universal suffrage, after all.

Someone said, in the 19th century, that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Wrongly attributed to Lincoln, this quotation does nonetheless capture Lincoln’s strong faith in the American people and his belief that the durability of self-government depends on the permanent attachment of our political institutions to the broad population. Lincoln did say, I’d note: “The people — the people — are the rightful masters of both Congresses, and courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.”

To fix democracy, to renovate democracy, requires confidence in constitutional, rights-protecting democracy. The party primaries that dominate our current system have been created and sustained by interests that lack that confidence. And so the American people are caught in a cramped, painful trap that does not respond to our aspirations and needs.

The task of undertaking to win policy victories via a competition for the allegiance of the whole electorate is bracing and hard. Yet it is fundamentally the necessary work of constitutional democracy — even for activist causes. The work starts by shutting down fear of one’s fellow citizens and replacing it with curiosity.

It turns out, then, that the trap we’re in is not merely the institutional problem of party primaries. It is also fear of our fellow citizens. There will be cultural work to do to get ourselves out of our trap. But for now, let’s start beating back the fear by scenario-planning how to fight elections in new conditions. There is a better world on the other side of freeing the bear. Let’s not be trapped by fear itself.

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