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# The Escape Hatches Are All Painted On
- URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/the-escape-hatches-are-all-painted-on/
- Published: 2026-09-15T15:00:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T15:00:11.000Z
- Description: Switch electoral systems, restore the Founders' actual vision, or take the party back from the inside. All three get tried on for size in this piece. None of them fit, and the reasons are worth understanding in detail rather than taking on faith.
- Author: Geoff Anderson
- Tags: There's no exit from the road we are on

> The discussion I heard where Sarah Longwell from The Bulwark is bullish on the restoration of an improved alignment to the constitution and reforms to cement American democracy. I take the side of her foil at The Bulwark, Jonathan Last, where the country is too hardened, too partisan, and too divided to fix without major dislocations. This is the start of a series on what any sort of restoration looks like. It isn't going to be cheery. I am sorry in advance.

On September 6, 2026, the far-right Alternative for Germany party won 43.8 percent of the vote in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double its result from 2021\. That gave the AfD 39 of 83 seats in the state parliament, three short of the 42 needed for an outright majority. German commentators described it as the closest the far right has come to power in a German state since the Nazi era. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the result had "shaken to its very foundations" his own Christian Democratic Union, which fell from 37.1 percent to 17.2 percent in the same election.

Germany's postwar political system was built with proportional representation specifically to prevent the kind of concentrated, unchecked power that produced the Third Reich. It came within three seats of failing at that exact task. This piece is about why that matters for the argument, common in American political conversation, that the country's two-party bind could be solved by adopting a different electoral system, restoring what the Constitution's framers actually intended, or reforming the Republican Party from within. Each of those three paths gets examined on its own terms below. Each one turns out to be closed, for a different and specific reason.

> Germany's postwar political system was built with proportional representation specifically to prevent the kind of concentrated, unchecked power that produced the Third Reich. It came within three seats of failing at that exact task.

#### Just Switch Systems

*Proportional representation does not prevent capture. It relocates where capture becomes visible.*

The case for parliamentary systems is straightforward and, as far as it goes, accurate. In the United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel, no single party typically wins a majority of seats outright, so governments are formed through post-election coalition negotiations between multiple parties. The head of government is generally the leader of the largest party able to assemble a working majority, chosen by the legislature rather than by a separate national vote. This structure allows smaller parties a path to representation that does not exist in a single-member, winner-take-all system like the one used in most of the United States.

What that comparison usually leaves out is what coalition government actually looks like in practice, including in the two countries most often held up as models.

Germany's February 2025 snap election left Merz's CDU/CSU in first place, with the [AfD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative%5Ffor%5FGermany?ref=sweatyspice.com) placing second, its strongest federal result up to that point. Merz needed a coalition with the Social Democrats to govern, and it took two ballots in the Bundestag to elect him chancellor, the first time since the founding of the modern German republic that a chancellor-designate failed to win on the first attempt. Coalition government does not guarantee smooth government. It guarantees negotiated government, and negotiations can fail.

Israel's system makes the same point more starkly. The Knesset dissolved itself in July 2026, completing a full term for the first time since 1988\. In the period leading up to that dissolution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition operated as a bare majority dependent on far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties that repeatedly threatened to collapse the government over disputes involving military conscription exemptions and the conduct of the war in Gaza. One far-right party did leave the coalition at one point, reducing the government to the narrowest possible margin. Proportional representation did not produce stability in this case. It produced a governing coalition whose survival depended, at multiple points, on the demands of parties representing a small fraction of the electorate.

There is a further complication specific to Germany that bears directly on the American debate. Germany's postwar political parties maintain what is commonly called a firewall, an informal but consistently applied agreement not to govern in coalition with the AfD, which Germany's domestic intelligence service has classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist movement. That firewall is currently under direct pressure from prominent American political figures. Elon Musk endorsed the AfD before the February 2025 election, telling German voters in a livestreamed conversation that "only AfD can save Germany," and later appearing by video at a party rally to describe the AfD as necessary to save the future of civilization. Vice President JD Vance used his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to criticize the firewall policy directly and met privately with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel instead of then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a decision German officials characterized as election interference. Following the Saxony-Anhalt result, President Trump reportedly shared the exit polling on social media in an approving tone.

The relevant point is not that proportional representation is worse than a two-party system. It is that proportional representation relocates the mechanism by which an illiberal movement can approach power. In the United States, that movement would need to capture one of two existing parties outright, which is what happened with the Republican Party after 2016\. In Germany, it can instead grow its own vote share until the arithmetic of coalition-building no longer allows the other parties to exclude it, which is the process now underway. Changing the electoral system does not remove the underlying phenomenon. It changes its shape.

#### At Least the UK Stayed Sane

*Westminster runs the same electoral math as the US House of Representatives. It has not collapsed the same way, yet, and the reason it might soon is worth being precise about.*

The United Kingdom is often invoked alongside Germany and Israel as evidence that multi-party democracy is achievable, but the comparison does not hold up on inspection. The House of Commons is elected through first-past-the-post voting in single-member constituencies, the same system used for the US House of Representatives. Political scientists have long observed, under what is generally called [Duverger's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s%5Flaw?ref=sweatyspice.com), that this kind of electoral system tends to produce two dominant parties, because a vote for a third option that cannot *realistically* win a given constituency functions, in practice, as a vote effectively withheld from the voter's second choice.

The reason Britain nonetheless has more than two parties with parliamentary representation is **not** that its electoral system rewards them. It is that some of those parties, most notably the Scottish National Party, have geographically concentrated support strong enough to win individual constituencies outright, and that devolved Scottish and Welsh legislatures use a form of proportional representation separate from Westminster elections entirely. Neither of those facts changes how seats in the House of Commons itself are allocated.

What is happening in British politics as of 2026 is a genuine complication to this picture, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has been polling ahead of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party for most of the year, with one January 2026 constituency-level projection giving Reform an outright parliamentary majority. Local elections in May 2026 confirmed the trend in actual votes, with Reform gaining more than 1,450 councillors nationally on roughly a quarter of the vote. Farage himself was elected to Parliament only in 2024, on his eighth attempt, with a party that then held five seats in total.

This does not disprove Duverger's Law so much as clarify its actual limits. The mechanism that normally protects a two-party duopoly under first-past-the-post voting depends on voters believing one of the two major parties remains a credible governing option worth defaulting to strategically. That logic breaks down when both major parties are collapsing at the same time, as Labour and the Conservatives currently are in Britain, rather than one losing ground to the other. This is a genuinely rare condition. It is not what happened with Ross Perot's independent presidential campaign in the United States in 1992, which peaked at roughly 19 percent of the national popular vote without ever threatening to displace either major party in a single congressional district. It is closer to what happened to the Whig Party in the United States in the 1850s, when both of its internal factions failed simultaneously rather than one side simply losing an election to the other.

Even granting that a legislative realignment of this kind is possible under first-past-the-post voting, a distinction between the British and American systems remains that a Reform UK victory would not itself override. Britain's head of government is whoever can command a working majority or plurality in the House of Commons, so a change in the composition of Parliament converts directly into a change in who governs. The American presidency requires something Britain's system does not: a majority of votes in the , allocated state by state on a winner-take-all basis in nearly every state. A third party could theoretically win a plurality of seats in the US House of Representatives under sufficiently unusual conditions. Winning the presidency through the same mechanism is a substantially harder problem, one that has not been resolved by anything other than the two established parties since the contingent election of 1824, and it is a problem the House of Commons simply does not have, because Britain does not separately elect a chief executive at all.

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#### Back to the Founders' Vision

*The constitutional design was built to insulate power from direct popular control, not to expand it. Restoring that design would mean less democracy, not more.*

A third argument, common enough to warrant direct engagement, holds that the solution to America's current political dysfunction is a return to the system the Constitution's framers actually intended, on the theory that they designed a more genuinely representative government than the one currently in operation. The documentary record does not support this. It supports close to the opposite.

Alexander Hamilton's [Federalist No. 68](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist%5FNo.%5F68?ref=sweatyspice.com) defends the [Electoral College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United%5FStates%5FElectoral%5FCollege?ref=sweatyspice.com) on the grounds that the choice of president should not be made directly by the general electorate at all. Under the system Hamilton describes, voters would choose electors, a temporary body assembled for the single purpose of selecting a president, precisely so that the ultimate decision would be insulated from what he and his contemporaries described as the passions of an unmediated popular vote. The president was not **meant** to be chosen by the people. He was meant to be chosen by a small number of electors the people had selected to exercise independent judgment on their behalf.

The original method for selecting members of the United States Senate reflects the same design principle even more directly. From 1789 until the ratification of the [Seventeenth Amendment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth%5FAmendment%5Fto%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FStates%5FConstitution?ref=sweatyspice.com) in 1913, one hundred twenty-four years, US senators were chosen by state legislatures, not by the voters of their states. The shift to direct election was gradual and contested rather than automatic. Oregon pioneered a workaround to force de facto direct election starting around 1907, and by 1912 twenty-nine states had adopted some form of it before the constitutional amendment made the practice universal. The original arrangement was defended at the time, including by James Madison, on the grounds that legislature-selected senators gave state governments a check against federal power, but the practical effect, whatever the stated rationale, was that half of Congress was deliberately shielded from the voters it represented for well over a century.

Voting rights at the founding were more restricted still. The Constitution left voter qualifications to individual states, and most states initially imposed property requirements substantial enough that, according to the notes James Madison kept of the Constitutional Convention, one delegate, Gouverneur Morris, argued explicitly for a property qualification on the franchise, while Benjamin Franklin argued against him in defense of ordinary citizens without property. In some states at the time of the founding, as much as 90 percent of white men were excluded from voting for lack of sufficient property. These qualifications were eliminated gradually over the following seventy years rather than all at once, with North Carolina the last state to remove them entirely, in 1856\. The transition was not always peaceful. Rhode Island's 1841 Dorr Rebellion, in which reformers organized an extralegal government and briefly took up arms in protest of the state's continued property requirement, is the clearest example of how contested this process actually was.

None of this is offered as an argument that the founding generation's views on democracy were monolithic or without internal disagreement, since Franklin's objection to Morris shows they were not. It is offered as evidence that the system in place at the founding was considerably less directly democratic than the system in place today, on essentially every measure available, the presidency, the Senate, and the franchise itself. A call to restore that original design is, whatever its intent, a call for less direct public control over government, not more.

#### Take the Party Back

*This specific strategy has already been attempted, by a stronger version of the same coalition, and it lost within a single afternoon.*

If a new party cannot realistically displace the Republican Party under the American electoral system, and if returning to an earlier constitutional design would not produce more democratic outcomes, the remaining option available to Republicans opposed to the party's current direction is to attempt to reclaim it from within. This is worth taking seriously as a strategy, and worth examining against both its present prospects and its most direct historical precedent.

The present prospects can be quantified and measured. In the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Nikki Haley's campaign represented the most organized version of this effort within electoral politics. She won a single state outright, Vermont, an open primary in which independents and crossover voters were eligible to participate, by a margin of roughly four points. Everywhere else, her support ranged from the low thirties in a small number of states down to the low teens in most others, and it continued to register in the mid-teens to low twenties as a protest vote well after she withdrew from the race entirely. That is the most recent, most direct measurement available of how large the constituency for reclaiming the party currently is.

The constituency is also not unified in what it wants, which compounds the size problem rather than offsetting it. Republicans in the mold of the Never Trump movement generally prioritize the restoration of institutional and democratic norms, and a meaningful number have been willing to support Democratic candidates to achieve that goal. Business-aligned Republicans, historically represented by organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce, generally prioritize tax and regulatory policy, and have tolerated a great deal of the current administration's conduct in exchange for exactly that. Their break with the administration has been narrower and more transactional, most visibly over tariffs and, more sharply, over legal immigration. In October 2025, the Chamber filed its first lawsuit against the Trump administration, seeking to block a $100,000 fee imposed on new H-1B visa applications, after having avoided litigation against the administration on other issues including its own regulatory rollbacks. Restrictionist Republicans in Congress, including Representative Chip Roy, publicly criticized the administration for the opposite reason, arguing that skilled-worker visas should be reduced rather than protected, while other Republicans, including Representative Maria Salazar, sided with the business community on the same question. A coalition attempting to reclaim the party would need to reconcile positions that are not merely different but, on at least this issue, directly opposed.

The historical precedent for this strategy is instructive, and it predates the current moment by more than sixty years. At the 1964 Republican National Convention, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then the most prominent figure in the party's moderate wing, took the podium to warn delegates that extremist elements were attempting to take over the party and needed to be repudiated by name. He was interrupted by sustained booing and chants of "We Want Barry" for the length of his remarks. A parallel effort by Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton to deny Barry Goldwater the nomination failed as well, and Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater told the delegates that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. Afterward, according to multiple contemporaneous accounts, moderate governors including Michigan's George Romney left the convention discouraged enough that they did little to campaign for the ticket in the general election that followed.

The 1964 moderate wing of the Republican Party held advantages that no comparable faction holds today. It controlled the Republican National Committee's institutional apparatus. It had the support of sitting governors across multiple large states and a former two-term president. It still lost, decisively, over the course of a single convention, and its most prominent leaders did not attempt a second campaign to retake the party afterward. A faction with fewer institutional resources, less unified goals, and a smaller demonstrated base of primary support is not positioned to succeed at a version of this same fight that a considerably stronger coalition already lost.

> A faction with fewer institutional resources, less unified goals, and a smaller demonstrated base of primary support is not positioned to succeed at a version of this same fight that a considerably stronger coalition already lost.

#### No Exit

None of the three paths examined here is a solution, and this piece has not offered one, because none is available to offer honestly. Proportional representation does not prevent an illiberal movement from approaching power. It relocates the moment at which that movement becomes visible from the capture of an existing party to a vote-share threshold in a coalition negotiation, as Germany's and Israel's current politics both demonstrate, and Britain's system provides only a conditional, rarely triggered exception rather than a real alternative. Returning to the constitutional design of the founding era would produce a system with less direct public input than the current one has, not more. And reclaiming the existing party from within has already been attempted, under considerably more favorable conditions than exist today, and it did not succeed.

This is not an argument that the current state of American politics is stable or acceptable. It is an argument that the three most commonly proposed institutional fixes for it do not do what they are generally believed to do, and that anyone evaluating them seriously should start from that fact rather than from the civics-class version of how these systems are supposed to work.

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