On September 27, famous journalist and author William Safire died. See this obituary. For 30 years, his column “On Language”, tracing the origin of English-language words and phrases, appeared in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. He also wrote 15 books, most of them about language.

For someone who was so interested in the meaning of words, Safire was surprisingly careless about the term “two-party system.” His 1968 book “The New Language of Politics” defined “two-party system” to mean:
“happy medium between one-party control and a profusion of splinter parties.” He repeated that definition when the book was republished in 1993 under the title “Safire’s New Political Dictionary.”

No scholarly work that defines “two-party system” agrees with Safire’s definition. Every other published reference work that defines the term always says that a two-party system has more than two political parties, but that two particular parties at any moment are far larger than all the others. Safire’s books did not have a listing for “multi-party system”. If Safire had defined the term, one wonders if he would have defined it as “a system composed of splinter parties.”

Safire was very influential. It is very likely that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the two sitting Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who have never voted in favor of a minor party in any election law case (unless that case included the Republican and Democratic Parties), were influenced by Safire. Safire’s use of “splinter group” as a synonym for minor parties is especially thoughtless. None of the long-lived nationally organized minor parties of the United States “splintered” from either the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. The term implies that the Democratic and Republican Parties encompass the entire field of political ideas and positions, and that when any other party comes into existence, it is because one of those parties suffered a faction fight.

Many years ago, I corresponded with William Safire about his definition of “two-party system” but he was not moved to change his opinion.