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I'm not an american, but it seems like the only way americans will be represented by their government is if they out the 2 party system.
There's this vibe of self-destruction in american society that is rooted in the 2 party system: one party is your mortal enemy and another doesn't quite represent you - so everyone just low key feels like destroying the whole thing rather than working on making it better.
Yeah i used to say this as a kid: why is the government spending any money at all on primaries, and then why do they only spend money on two parties. Any private party should just pay for their own primaries, the govt should only be concerned with the general elections.
To my prepubescent eyes, it was clearly the government rigging elections. But all the adults told me that I didn't understand.
Now 30 years later it's plain as day that it was always a problem, and now we have a chomo-in-chief blowing up fishermen halfway around the world and people still don't see the problem with the two party system.
Money In Politics
Two Party System
Gerrymandering
Electoral College
The four horsemen of a Democratic apocalypse.
If we could fix just one of those four issues, things would gradually start to get better. But the politicians in Washington don't have the political will or desire to do so, because removing any one of them naturally limits their power and authority.
I would argue based on 2025-26 the US is a one party system. A party of corruption, graft and self-enrichment.
I don't disagree, but the problem stems from neither party being motivated to be anything more than ideologically different from one another, and the system being designed on purpose to squash a viable 3rd party from ever emerging. If we instead had a parliamentary system and did away with FPTP voting, we could have more coalition building around issues rather than feeling like we have no choice but to select what we deem to be the lesser of two evils, and political parties would be forced to fix issues rather than just campaign on them.
If we organize we could seize control of the democratic party, and the Democratic establishment has been scared shitless of that since 2016, but they managed to play us off each other like chumps. And they still are. Because we have no organization. Turning us against each other.
The Democratic Party is a private institution. They are not scared of anything their voters do, because in the end they can simply control who gets money, who gets nominated, committee assignments, etc.
Yes, but they don't control who YOU vote for
They do control who votes on our behalf though. Citizens vote through a proxy, not directly for any given candidate. And our representatives can technically vote however they want.
That's why people like Talarico and Platner matter. Platner just beat out Mills, the establishment pick for the seat. He shows that democracy works when people are engaged and organized.
In a hypothetical world where extremely unlikely things could happen for the sake of experiment, what would happen… if we all just said “fuck you” to the establishment? We all stopped going to jury duty, we stopped voting, we stopped working, … then we organized and created our own jury, elections, and essential work? Like, if we somehow seized the process of capital punishment, capital gains, capital everything… by just deciding to do it for ourselves, not for modern capitalist organizations. Why would happen? Would the government see its own society as a kind of militia and attempt to recapture control? How might they when no citizen is cooperating?
They'll shoot at you
Have you seen the other options? Libertarians are a NAMBLA fueled trainwreck. Greens are... not great for a lot of reasons. Third Way is just fascism in a three piece suit. Reform is six oil companies in a trench coat.
You can't multi-party your way out of this one.
You can indeed have better governing by a multi party system. But then again how would you americans know? Oh wait, you are somehow different then everyone and even trying something different is crazy.
Enjoy your rapidly collapsing empire I guess. You have truely tried nothing and are all out of ideas after all.
Glances at German, the UK, France, and Canada
I'm still waiting for these bets to pay out.
Because we're not trapped in the fucking basement. Countries with multi-party systems have the exact same basket of Principle-Agent problems suffered by US constituencies. The Two-Party system is endemic of partisan entrenchment and FPTP elections and a bunch of other archaic proto-democratic procedural relics. But a Three-Party system doesn't get around all the other problems of district-based representation, over-large constituencies, money in politics, private monopolies in mass media, or the simple fact that the bigger parties have all the manpower and the first selection of appealing candidates.
It should be mentioned that Donald Trump tried to run for President way the fuck back in 2000 and couldn't even get the Reform Party endorsement. What propelled his campaign in 2016 was the obsessive media coverage that he couldn't get sixteen years earlier.
Trump was able to tap a neglected base of voters largely concentrated in the GOP and solidify a party at war with itself under Obama. Splitting his brand of MAGA Fascism into its own partisan force leaves us with all the same problems we're facing under a modern GOP majority.
Similarly, the Reform UK in Britain is just gobbling up all the Conservative voters. This, while the Greens and... uh... Your Party(?) are snatching up Labour. When you can only have one winner per district, multiple parties do nothing to improve individual representation, because you're still stuck in a district that's split 60/40 between "People who kinda-sorta agree with you" and "People who want to see you drawn and quartered".
Whistling past the graveyard, bitch.
Yeap, but keep doing the same thing I am sure its going to change.
NONE of those nations is even 1/10 as fucked as your nation is.
We only have a 2 party system on paper. Behind closed doors, they are working for the same goals. Make the rich people happy so they can be rich people with influence. The general population is just something that they have to manage on their way to their goals. Adding more parties will help, but it will eventually end up the same. As long as you need money to get elected, then money will control those who get elected.
This guy is from Maine, and they do have ranked choice voting for federal elections, one of the steps on the way to breaking the two-party stranglehold.
Of course the Republicans fought it tooth and nail, because they will never win another race with a system like this, and exploited a loophole in the state constitution to keep ranked choice out of state races.
Back that up with a proportional representation system.
Any party with full control will become a tyrant.
If the constitution and the political dynamics are designed for bi-partisan system it's pretty hard to evolve out of it. A third party can also play as the king maker and have an unfair influence compared to its size. Some countries have a more dynamic coalition system but that has biases as well.
America will never be fixed because that would require all anericans to look inward and accept their shortcomings. Americans are incapable of doing that
Ah yes, it's not a train of systemic issues compounding over 250 years combined with weaponized wealth disparity to keep everyone sick, isolated and tired. It's because they won't pull up their moral bootstraps.
Give me a fucking break.
Rofl, not quite. There are plenty of Americans who think it's fucked up, but thank you for generalizing.