Explaining our Divisions with Pizza
Why are we really divided? This is Part 1 of "Today's Common Sense", a non-partisan series exploring the root cause of our democracy's problems.
“We can build a stronger democracy, one that works for the people, without dividing us in two. Maybe that is difficult for you to imagine. We have been divided for a very long time. It has been so long that our divisions can seem natural, even inevitable.
But we know humans are not born into the world divided. And if we are not born divided, there must be forces in this world that are pushing us apart.”
INTRODUCTION
I’m going to tell you a very different story about how we ended up so divided, one that doesn’t paint half our country as misinformed, self-interested, or morally backwards people. It is easy to blame our political dysfunction on the corrupt politicians and citizens who do not live up to our civic ideals. We tell ourselves “democracy works, just not with imperfect citizens like them”. That story has power because even at our bests, we could always be better, more like the ideal citizens we imagine democracies were made for. Without realizing it we let fixing democracy became “fixing” each other.
Maybe it is true, maybe we did break our democracy. But I’m starting to think that it was our democracy that broke us.
Mountains on every continent look like triangles because the forces that shape them exist everywhere on Earth. Plate tectonics push the land up and erosion carves the distinctive, narrowing peaks. Democracies around the world also share a distinctive shape: they have exactly two-sides, that are stuck in a never-ending tie. Both sides can always win the next election, neither runs away with the game. And while both parties will tell you they are fighting for their principles, if you watch for long enough, they trade those sacred principles with the other side:
It was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, who sent the US Army to break up the workers strike at Pullman.
William Howard Taft, a Republican, helped create the federal income tax.
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, jailed the editors of anti-war and socialist publications, and led an all out assault on free-speech.
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, led a war that freed the enslaved and forever-after made the federal government supreme to the states.
After that war, it was the Democrats in the South who resisted expanding civil rights for generations.
We cannot see the forces that shape our democracy, but we know they are there because of the strange patterns they left behind. These forces — whatever they are — are powerful enough to make the Democrats support segregation and Republicans create new taxes. We should be paying more attention to them.
When I was younger, I really believed we were divided because we disagreed with each other. The left and the right have very different ideas about morality and how to best govern. I assumed the political fighting was just how we figured out whose ideas worked the best. I could not grasp why was the game still so close to 50-50. After hundreds of years, it seemed like the side with all the best ideas (my side) should be winning.
And there it is. When you zoom out, even a little, politics stops looking like a debate over ideas. Our history is screaming at us to accept an important truth: we are not really fighting over the ideas even though it feels that way — even though every time you turn on the TV, that’s what you see, people arguing about ideas. If we want to heal our divisions, if we want our government to work for the people again, then we need to understand what we are really fighting about.
Take a last breath, and watch the game the way that a child would. See how strange we look playing:
There are exactly two sides,
Who are always tied near 50 50,
Both sides claim to be fighting for their ideological principles,
While trading those same principles and policies back and forth with the other team throughout the game.
It is clear that the score will remain tied. There will be no long-term winner. This does not seem to be the kind of debate that can even have a winner.
The “good” side has not always been good. The “bad” side used to champion everything you believe. Neither is consistent. Neither has integrity.
So then, what are we really fighting over?
Why are we really divided?
WELCOME TO PIZZA TOWN
Instead of talking about specific political parties and their policies, I want you to imagine a small town with a central Main Street and only two restaurants. Both restaurants are pizza shops. There is one shop on the left side of the street and one on the right.
Now imagine your ideal pizza order. What combination of crust, sauce, and toppings makes the perfect pizza for you?
On Friday you visit the pizza shop on the left and order your ideal pizza. On Saturday you visit the pizza shop on the right and make the same order. Each reader knows what they want (your order), but there are many steps between turning that order —just words on a slip of paper — into a pizza. Both chefs will need to use all their skills in the kitchen to make the pizza you want. Every time they see you, they ask “how was it?” and use the feedback to improve the process.
Over time the chef who does the best job gains a larger market share. The other chef wants to keep up, so he works hard to improve his craft. A virtuous cycle emerges, both pizza parlors in the town show steady increases in quality, while balancing each other on price.
The pizza tastes good, the people like it, and each year it is getting better. The chefs are using the full breadth of their talents, experimenting constantly, and find their work fulfilling.
This pizza gets better because the two shops are in a genuine competition. The only way for either chef to win is by making better pizza.
But we only have to change one thing to make this idyllic pizza-loving town more like our democracy. Let’s create a new rule: patrons are no longer allowed to order custom pizzas. Each chef is required to sell a single kind of pizza, a specialty pie. Everyone who comes into their shop has to order the same thing.
You used to be able to order exactly what you wanted, with plenty of nuances, but now you can only choose between two options. Each pizza has ingredients and toppings that reflect some popular tastes, but there are only two possible combinations at any one time.
So what happens when we make the people of Pizza Town order only left or right?
Each chef probably starts by making the best pizza he can imagine. After the first week, most people think the specialty pie dreamed up by chef on the right tastes better. Word spreads and the crowd flocks to his shop.
The chef on the left needs to do something to respond. He goes back into the kitchen and realizes he has two choices: he can copy the other pie outright to make the competition about quality, or he can copy the right’s pizza and add an exciting new topping. He goes with the second option and it works!
Now the left pizza shop is making a better pizza, and the word is spreading. The chef on the right goes back to the kitchen and cooks up something new, allowing him to take the lead once again.
For the first few weeks, things carry on like this, with big swings in patronage and interesting new pizza inventions. But at some point, things start to settle close to a stable 50/50 split.
This happens for two reasons:
First, the competition is exhausting for the people of the town. Switching sides constantly and having to keep up with the latest pizza debates takes a lot of effort. Once habits and tastes form, they are unlikely to switch sides unless they are very disappointed by a change to their pie, or very enticed to go try the other.
The second, more subtle development, is that the chefs become driven less by a desire to make good pizza and more by a desire to increase their market share. They got comfortable making some compromises in quality to attract more customers. If the people are buying it then it can’t be bad…
This first time this happened was when an intern sent out a survey to all the people in the town. He discovered a big opportunity: people miss the jalapeños. He recommended they put jalapeños on their shop’s pizza and bought a big billboard. That week, the left’s new pie was a huge hit, getting 65% of the sales.
The right chef knew that jalapeños were broadly popular, even with his own patrons. To level the playing field, the decision was made to put jalapeños on their pizza too. From the outside this might look like a compromise between the two sides, maybe even political progress. But the right’s chef is did not add jalapeños to their pizza to make a better pie. Rather, the goal of the compromise was to remove the left’s momentary advantage.
The worst part of this decision was that the quality of the pizza was compromised. The jalapeños did not really make sense next to the right’s banana peppers. They created an abomination, but a winning abomination it was. This is how the contradictions and hypocrisies of our political parties were born.
After a few months there is nobody in the town who can really explain what separates the two pizzas. The town’s intellectuals construct simple narratives to help the people talk about the differences between the shops, but when you push on any these stories — even a little — they fall down. The environmental conservation crowd share their name and their philosophy with the be-careful-what-you-change conservatives. And the free-market crowd’s hero, Adam Smith, was a liberal philosopher.
It is not surprising to us how messy and unsatisfactory the grand pizza and political narratives are. We know now that there was no vision or ideological reason that motivated each chef to put all their toppings together. The pizzas are just a collection of toppings that offered a momentary advantage, all stacked on top of each other.
Eventually both chefs stop the practice of asking “how was it?”. Instead, they pace around the shop as people are eating and remind them the pizza is great. If a patron seems unhappy, they explain why the pie on the other side of the street is truly flawed: “You think that’s bad? Have you seen how oily those pizzas are across the street? They’ll slip right out of those fine delicate hands of yours, ma’am.”
Even if in their hearts the chefs know none of this makes sense, they have greater incentive to justify their Frankenstein pizzas than they do to make a better pie.
This goes back and forth for a long time. Each side uses demographic and survey data to find small changes they can make to their pies that will move a few people from one side to the other. This keeps the game close to a tie, and stops either side pulling too far ahead.
That intern from before is now the General Manager. His big break was realizing that some changes to the pizza recipe had more impact than others. If you put meat on the pizza you’ll get all the carnivores and none of the vegetarians, but at least you can predict the behavior of these people — they are “locked in.” Now the shop can add whatever they want to bring in the next person, provided they don’t mess with the core ingredients that keep that base in line. A carnivore who hates onions will even buy a pizza with onions on it, because the alternative is that “damn veggie pie from the other side”. We all end up eating things we do not really want to eat. There are always issues on the side each of us vote for that we do not really believe in. He had discovered “wedge issues” — no pun intended.
When both shops stop worrying about what makes pizza taste good, everyone suffers. The people are still free to choose their pizza, but that doesn’t mean the pizzas they get to choose between will be any good. Everybody is still free to choose their representatives, but that doesn’t mean we get a government for the people.
The story of Pizza Town helps explain why the sides have changed in every way but one: they continue to oppose the other. Neither side can pull ahead because there is always a thread to pull, a topping to add or remove, which returns the game to 50-50. The more data you have, the easier it is to find these moves. The surveys and the machines for tallying the results are only getting better, meaning the game is only going to get tighter.
This form of power competition even explains the political pole reversals, those times in our history when the parties flip sides. Political pole reversals are difficult to explain if you believe the debate between the two sides is ideological. They are quite easy to explain if you imagine them happening one step at a time, in pursuit of small political advantages. Each tiny modification to a party’s platform is like adding a pizza topping to gain a new customer.
If growing and sustaining market share is what you ultimately care about, then it does not matter whether the ingredients on your side make sense together, or are consistent with the platform you had last decade.
The final descent of pizza town comes when the conversation stops being about pizza.
The new billboard proudly proclaims: “Chef Mark…our pizza is more authentic than ya pizza – Chef Hugo.”
In response, the other shop writes: “Doctors agree – the healthiest pizza in town.”
The pizza is already bad and many people have stopped paying attention to the menu, they just order the pie they always do.
When each side puts culture on the menu, they find the people of the town can once again be corralled into visiting their shops.
By this time, chefs have lost nearly all their power. They are still the face of the pizza shops, but they no longer have the freedom to make good pizza or decide what goes on the menu — that is up to management and the statisticians. Good chefs stop applying to any jobs in Pizza Town. What self-respecting chef who cares about his customers would want to work there?
Everyone in pizza town is doing what they are incentivized to do. The pizza gets worse because no one has incentives to make it better. Market share can be gained and sustained without making a good pizza. In representative democracies this means power can be gained and sustained without working for the people.
WHY OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM WORKS LIKE PIZZA TOWN
This is Maurice Duverger, a French political scientist.
In the 1940s he made an observation that turned out to be so accurate that political scientists still call it Duverger’s Law.
Duverger noticed that democracies that voted the way that we do, always end up with exactly two sides. He couldn’t find an ideological, historical or cultural basis for this. When he studied what the “left” and “right” parties believed, it varied from country to country, but the number of parties did not.
The only thing they had in common was the way they voted: the candidate who won the most votes won the election. That is called first-past-the-post voting and it is how we vote in America. Duverger’s law says that two sides always appear when a country votes this way.
If Duverger is right, if two sides are inevitable in a system like ours, then what does it mean to be on the left or the right? What does each side stand for?
Is the divide ideological? All the people who believe in liberal principles are on the left, and all the people who believe in conservative principles are on the right.
Between the educated and the uneducated?
Good people vs bad people?
Old ways vs the new way?
The rich and their friends vs. the poor?
There is problem with drawing any line like: now you have to explain why exactly half of every generation ends up on each side of your line. Why are half the people good and half bad? Why do exactly half value liberty and the other half equality? Why are exactly half of us smart and the other half ignorant?
What could possibly cause such a finely calibrated error in humanity itself? Nothing.
If Duverger drew the dividing line, he would not use those labels to describe the differences between the two sides. All he would do is write “Winners” on one side and “Losers” on the other. It can be that simple. When you give power to whomever wins the most votes, you always end up with those two groups. The winning party is on one side and all the losers stand together on the other side. The biggest loser is the opposition party, but they share the losing side of the line with all the smaller parties who fielded candidates.
Even if the winners only got 1% more of the vote, they get nearly all of the power. The opposition party can get just one fewer vote, but instead of ending up with slightly less power than the winners, they end up with almost no power at all. This is what makes voting for a third party equivalent to throwing your vote away. Voters realize this and usually choose not to vote for small parties. This is why third parties never last, even though many voters wish there were more options. There will never be viable third parties in a country that uses first-past-the-post voting. It is just math.
Duverger’s law explains why there are always two sides. The way we vote split us in two before either side’s ideology existed. So where did the ideologies come from? Duverger has less to say about that, but you have read Pizza Town, you know what happens next.
Think about what you would do if you were the loser in the last election.
The only way for you to get back into power is to get a few people from the winning side to walk over the dividing line and switch sides. You could try to convincing people that your side produces higher quality government, that your pizza is better. That is too slow and it is difficult to do. Just like we saw in Pizza Town, the easier approach is to adopt one key issue that will get some people to walk over the line. You are incentivized to adopt this new position, even if it goes against one of your core principles. If the cost of going from no power to all the power is a little hypocrisy…who can say no?
Your side believes what it does because at some time in the past each of the stories they tell gave them a political advantage. This is all that ideology is: a collection of simple narratives about what one side believes, and why you should believe it too. Each side tells these stories to hold their coalitions together, and to convince voters from the other side to join them. It does not matter if all these stories make sense together, or remain consistent over the decades. It does not matter if politicians or citizens live up to their principles. That is not what this is about.
We started our conversation today discussing the strange shape of democracies: two sides, stuck in a never-ending tie, that trade places on key issues. Now you can explain why we are divided in two without even talking about the political spectrum. America was always destined to have two sides because an arbitrary line splits us in half. In democracy, that line is drawn by the way we vote. In Pizza Town it was just a street. When a population is split down the middle, and power is given to the bigger side, there are massive incentives for each side to constantly rewrite their ideology (the pizza recipe) in pursuit of power. Both parties have proven time and again that they will trade their ideological principles and effective governance for a few more votes.
Our political reality is almost the exact opposite of our initial intuitions. We are not fighting about whose moral beliefs and ideas about governing work best. The parties are fighting for power by changing their beliefs.
POWER TO THE MARGIN
We know that both sides are willing to change their ideologies to win elections. This gives small groups of single-issue voters (on both sides) enormous power in our political system. Counterintuitively, the closer we are to a tie, the more smaller groups can influence the political agenda.
That is not an opinion, it is written across our history, and it is in math. A game theorist would explain that power concentrates “to the margins” and offer a simple example:
You and four friends are voting on where to go for lunch. Two people want to go to the sandwich shop, and two people want to go to the taco stand. Everyone gets one vote, but as the tiebreaker, you are the one with all the power. The choice of where to go to lunch is entirely yours. If you do not care what you have for lunch, there is even an opportunity to trade the power you have today for a favor tomorrow.
Everyone can get the same number of votes, those votes can be counted fairly, and you still end up with some individuals that have more influence than others. The relative influence of your vote is dependent on how the people around you choose to exercise theirs.
In our political system this effect manifests in an interesting way: single issue voters end up with substantially more influence than average voters. That’s right, the votes of people who only care about a single issue (like the environment or gun control policies) are worth more than the votes of the rest of us.
Let’s return to Pizza Town to understand why:
Imagine 10% of the population cares more about pepperoni than any other topping. These are single issue voters who will vote for whichever pizza has pepperoni on it. After discovering this, one shop adds pepperoni to create an advantage.
We know that political parties and pizza shops like targeting predictable voters. Single issue voters are by definition the most predictable voters of all — add what they want to your pizza, and you will get their support every time. Adding pepperoni is a “sure thing.”
This works! In the next election they get the support of the 10% they targeted. This is what we expect, but something else happens. The power of the pepperoni voters gets multiplied. Think about the other people who were already patrons of this shop before pepperoni was added.
Some people are ok with pepperoni, but it’s not their main issue. They become impartial allies.
Some people actively dislike pepperoni, but won’t leave because there is another topping on the pizza (like fresh mozzarella) that keeps them there. They become unwilling allies.
A few people leave because they are strongly against pepperoni. They cannot believe it’s on their pizza now and rush to the other side.
The pizza shop got something, but the pepperoni voters arguably got more. They walk away with a ton of new allies. What started with a dedicated group totaling 10% of the population has an entire political party (~50%) fighting for it.
America’s brief experiment with Prohibition is a great example of how a minority view can become the law. Most Americans did not support the ban on alcohol. Daniel Okrent, the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" explained in an interview:
I think the major misconception more than anything else is that prohibition is something the majority of Americans wanted.
In fact, it was primarily the work of one pressure group — the first such group that called itself a pressure group. The Anti-Saloon League knew that if you controlled the margins, you could win legislative majorities and even supermajorities. In any given district, they'd say, Look, 45 percent of the people are for the Democrat, and 45 percent of the people are for the Republican. Who controls the 10 percent of the middle? And that's what they fought for — those 10 percent who would vote for whomever the ASL told them to vote for. By picking only one issue and not caring what legislative candidates — state or federal — cared about in terms of other issues, they were able to have an enormous effect.
In a representative democracy an issue’s popular support rarely equals that cause’s political power. A policy 80% of the country supports will get no attention, while an issue championed by a small-committed group of 10% gets the spotlight. Today’s most divisive social issues are characterized by one side wielding disproportionate influence over the national agenda.
This cuts both ways. Sometimes it helps your side get something you care about faster. And sometimes it helps a small group of people on the other side pass national policies you don’t like. You should be mad about minority rule in both cases, even when it helps a cause you support, because it is not democratic.
We do not have majority rule today, and we never have. The way we vote gives the power to special interest groups, usually located on the extreme ends of both parties. As we have built better computers and collected more data it has become easier for the two parties to keep the game close to a perfect tie, further magnifying this effect.
Giving power to whomever wins the most votes leads to minority rule. Ironic, but true.
THE SILENT TERROR OF FORCED CONFORMITY
What was the one change that ruined Pizza Town? We did not have to take away anyone’s right to vote, make people less intelligent, or start spreading misinformation. We did not have to make half the citizens selfish or morally backwards. All that we had to do was limit everybody’s choices in the same way. Taking away each citizen’s right to order the exact pizza they wanted had a devastating effect on the people, the chefs, and the quality of the town’s pizza.
The way we do democracy offers us the same limited choices. We still have the right to vote, but not the right to vote for exactly what we value. We are only allowed to vote for certain combinations of political positions — those speciality Pizzas.
Making voters eat a few toppings they dislike might not sound like enough to break a democracy, but it is more than enough to break the relationships at the center of our democracy. When we are forced into political conformity, we stop treating each other as human beings.
Forced conformity makes voters predictable and easy to “lock-in” with wedge issues. This allows the politicians to treat us like numbers. We are “votes to be won”, not actual families to be served. Politicians know we will eat their pizza even if it tastes bad.
And we, the people, we are not free of blame. We treat our politicians as mere containers for our political beliefs — they are not people, they are “just another vote in congress”. Their character does not matter. Their only job is to push the correct button. We stay in unhealthy relationships with them even after they feed us bad pizza.
And instead of seeing our opponents on the other side as individual human beings, we group them together into faceless, story-less, drones. In casual conversation we speak of all our opponents at once — millions of unique individuals — as a single them. “We believe this, but they believe that…”. You know that you are an unwilling ally to many of your party’s causes. It is harder to realize that most of our opponents are stuck in the same trap.
Just think about how you vote. Every election, you pick the side championing the 1-3 wedge issues that matter most to you — your favorite toppings. You never get to choose all the other toppings on your pizza, the other positions your side supports. Even when you want a topping from the other side, you are not allowed to have it. When you disagree with something your party supports, you have to support it anyway. And so do your opponents on the other side.
The lines have already drawn for us — it is like our very thoughts are being gerrymandered.
We are told that it is honorable to support our side even though we do not agree with them on everything. “Don’t throw away your vote! You have to compromise!”
What if all of us compromising and playing politics is the very thing that breaks democracy?
The more people I meet, the more confident I am that we would all order the “build your own” option if we could.
If everyone could build their own ballot, you would be surprised by all the people on the other side who order the same toppings you do. There are many Republicans who vote for conservative economic policies, but do not support unrestricted gun rights. There are many Democrats who vote for liberal immigration policies, but do not support changing gender norms in elementary schools.
Those four positions have absolutely nothing to do with one another — they should be completely independent. In the real world you could support any combination of them. It is only in the political world we have built for ourselves, that they cannot coexist. Forced conformity is what puts unrelated political positions into direct conflict with one another.
It is impossible for you to vote for gun control without also voting for higher taxes. Regardless of your opinion on either issue, consider how absolutely absurd it is that you do not have the freedom to vote for one without the other. These are not opposing positions. They literally have nothing to do with each other.
There are people on the other side who share many of your values. They only vote for the other side because they prioritize their values differently than you do. You should not think of these people as your opponents. They have faces — try to imagine them sitting across from you right now. That face, that person, cannot vote for a position the two of you believe in for no-good-reason. They are trapped in a system that does not allow them to vote for exactly what they value, and so are you. Given the choice, you would both be ordering the jalapeños …
Even if you were able to convince someone on the other side that your party has better ideas about some policy area — let’s say education — it is not clear what that person supposed to do next. Forced conformity makes it impossible for him to politically support just that one idea from your side, even if he wanted to.
Now he has to decide if he should switch to the other political party. This means ranking all the issues against each other: “Is education policy more important to me than protecting my job?”
Wow…how he answers that one says a lot about who he is as a person. This is no longer a friendly chat about education policy — you are now in a full-on values and identity conversation.
Why does this man have to choose between protecting his job (trade policy) and helping kids in his state (education policy)? Why must he even decide if he is going to be the kind of person who puts his financial security above the future of his neighbor’s children? Those two issues could not be further apart from each other. Forced conformity is what puts them in direct conflict.
If he chooses to vote for his job security, he will be called “self-interested.” But who is to say he would not choose both if he could? The problem is the choice itself; the arbitrary and unfair situation forced conformity has put him in. Maybe the other side is not as self-interested as you imagine them to be. They appear selfish only because we live in a system where we are often forced to choose between helping others or helping ourselves – even when doing both could be possible.
When you discuss politics with someone on the other side, you are never just debating one issue. Forced conformity means you are always debating all of them, and the identity of both people having the conversation. That is what makes it so emotional. That’s why we can’t hear each other. That’s why it’s so difficult to talk about politics.
The way we vote is what makes our differences more important than the many things we have in common.
We are not divided because half of us are completely left-wing and half of us are completely right-wing.
We are divided because we are forced to choose.
In Part II we will talk about solutions and find our way out of Pizza Town. We’ll be exploring the history of democracy, the tragic fall of politicians, and new ideas for voting that can end forced conformity.
I know that we can build a stronger democracy, one that works for the people, without dividing us.
Looking ahead:
✅ Why are we divided: Explaining our Divisions with Pizza
[coming May ‘24] The Representative Trap
[coming June ‘24] How to build a Responsible Democracies