I’m from the United States, but I find the polarization we’ve experienced since electing Donald Trump somewhat frightening. If people ever felt they had an excuse to distrust their neighbors, it’s now, and instead of trying to allay people’s fears, the big corporations are playing right along. I don’t understand why a civilized nation allows this. Why can’t we make change for the better and eliminate the two party system or at least bring it back to a moderate stance?
18 comments
The two party system is not encoded in law it just persists due to their **massive** institutional inertia and the fact that two main coalitions will naturally form from factions in most any country. Ours takes the places of factions within the parties rather than each faction being it’s own party.
If you want a third party *you* have to support and vote for them, be the change you want to see.
Because how could it be made illegal? Anyway, the two party system has pros and cons. On the one hand, it is a system that prevents minority (as in numbers) or extremist parties from being able to gain much traction. In some countries, a party that gets 1/3 of the votes can be given power, which is a way that extremist parties who only have a fraction of the popular support could win an election, this is generally a bad thing. On the the other hand, any party wishing to win in a 2-party state must adopt at least some policies that gain popularity (gay marriage legality, for example) in order to stay competitive.
The things in your post that you find concerning have far less to do with a 2 party system and more to do with changing demographics and values on the part of the citizenry, and corruption on the part of the government and corporations.
Edits for spelling
To many older generations like how things are. Until they die off the change is going to be slow process. I think a lot of younger people can agree the current popular parties don’t represent them fully. I’m curious what the future holds.
What exactly is the “true will of the people”?
$$$$$$$$$
*laughs in remembers the 90s* 🤣
I reject the fact that the 2 party system is a bad thing. People outside the US, I think misread our parties as similar to the highly ideologically rigid parties and centralized abroad but our parties are really more like coalitions in parliamentary systems in that there are a lot of different ideologies working together because they oppose the other side. Our parties are much more decentralized so there’s a lot more decentralized. Back to my point about them being similar to coalitions, it is something that naturally occurs in democracies. You always end up with the ruling party and the opposition, each with roughly half the population.
The true will of what people? You and your friends?
What about then “true will” of the people you disagree with?
How do you know that “the true will of the people” isn’t already being done?
The polarization you blame on electing Donal Trump has existed for far longer than that. It existed with Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, etc.
What you are seeing is people have easier ways to argue about their politics with social media.
Reddit for example is very far on the left side of the political spectrum.
Get enough people to vote third parties. It starts with you.
I don’t know how “the US” would stop the two party system. We already have several minor parties, but they haven’t gotten any traction because they appeal to too few people. Start a better party. If you could get enough representatives in either (especially both) chamber of Congress to keep either major party from having a majority, you’d have some real power.
But it’d be a long time before you’d be likely to get a member elected president. It would take a true landslide, otherwise no one gets a majority of the electoral votes and the election gets thrown into the House.
>means that the true will of the people is never realized?
Are you really sure about that?
Rest of it you really need to get off the internet.
As for why the constitution allows parties to exist?
1st amendment baby.
Two things. One, it’s not so much that the country allows the two party system to exist as it is that our election system leads naturally to a two-party system. Also, the people who would be responsible for changing the laws are the people who benefit from a two-party system, so it’s hard to change.
That said, a two-party system is not inherently worse than the multi-party systems other countries have. It just changes where the compromises get made.
Because the government telling us how many parties we can have and how parties will act sounds incredibly dystopian to me not to mention unconstitutional.
The two-party system isn’t a government sanctioned institution, but one that exists because of the freedom of association. If the US was to disallow the two-party system, it would require violating certain freedoms in the US Constitution. At best, the US could change policies that favor the two-party system, but many of these policies are baked into our Constitution or dictated by the states.
Additionally, the two-party system exists because of “the will of the people.” “The will of the people” is heterogeneous where there are fundamental policy and governance disagreements across large swaths of our 50 states, 3.8 million square miles of land, and 330 million citizens, and these various factions gather into one of the parties to advocate for their desired polices.
Per your comment about return to a moderate stance, there is a strong tendency for partisanship to ebb and flow throughout US history. We’ll experience 10-15 years of extreme partisanship followed by a decade or two of relative moderation. We seem to be in the midst of an era of hyper-partisanship, but it most likely won’t last forever.
Let me give you a real answer: because the people who’d have to pass laws to allow for better election systems wouldn’t benefit from it. This is also why gerrymandering Is still legal. I know that’s a simple take but it really is no more complicated than that.
Anything else is inertia. It doesn’t matter that first past the post voting is proven time and time again to be a terrible system that leads to polarization and 2 parties existing if it’s what people are used to.
It’s because we have a “first past the post” electoral system, where whoever gets the most votes wins. It’s the way a government that has separate executive and legislatures work.
In Parliamentary systems, the elections are often proportional, in which parties receive seats based upon the percentage of votes that they get. And then you have to put together a ruling coalition to get a majority. If you can’t get a majority of the votes, the whole government fails.
Last year the UK had three Prime Ministers in two months. Israel has had 4 elections in the past 5 years. Italy’s government is constantly failing.
Multiparty systems are not necessarily better.
Other parties do exist, they just don’t have a big following. The capability is there, it’s up to the people to give them the power needed to play a key role