Posted on 01/14/2025 3:06:53 AM PST by Cronos
In early 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democrat from New York, was asked to speculate about her role under a Joe Biden presidency. She groaned. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” she said, “but in America, we are.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s frustration with the two-party system reflects the frustration American voters feel every time they step into the voting booth, when they find themselves stuck with the same two choices — and, in most places, only one with any shot at winning.
As a new Congress sputters into gear, this rusty binary split — a product of our antiquated winner-take-all electoral mechanisms — is key to understanding why our national legislature has become the divisive, dysfunctional place it is today. It is why more than 200 leading political scientists and historians (including one of the authors of this essay) signed an open letter in 2022 calling on the House of Representatives to adopt proportional representation — an intuitive and widely used electoral system that ensures parties earn seats in proportion to how many people vote for them. The result is increased electoral competition and, ultimately, a broader range of political parties for voters to choose from.
In 2024 fewer than 10 percent of U.S. House races were competitive. In a vast majority of districts, one party or the other wins by landslides. Driven by a decades-long geographic sorting that has concentrated Democrats in cities and Republicans in rural areas and reinforced by partisan gerrymandering, this split electoral landscape has fostered a polarized climate that becomes more entrenched with each election.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If the NYT thinks it’s a good idea, then I don’t.
The problem is that it is all one big unipary corruptocracy.
The NYT wants to muddy the waters so leftists can rule again....
“The issue is not the issue, the revolution is the issue.”
Two party rule is a mirage. Saying it doesn’t make it so.
In other countries one can see big parties manipulating the smaller ones in coalitions.
OR
You're forced to form your coalition after the election in proportional representation systems like you often see in European countries.
I prefer the former to the latter because it forces the parties/candidates to answer much more specifically about what their policies will be if elected. In the latter systems the largest party might have to roll over and give up policy making on this key issue or that in order to bring a minority party into the coalition so as to achieve a minority. That really sucks if you voted for that larger party thinking they were going to have one policy on an issue that was really important to you only to see that handed over to another party you did not vote for which might have a very different policy than the one you wanted.
and yes, I know politicians frequently lie and break their promises to voters and do not do what they said they were going to. That's true in all systems.
>> “The issue is not the issue, the revolution is the issue.”
Nailed it!
oops. I meant to say “so as to achieve a majority” in the 3rd paragraph, not so as to achieve a minority.
Maybe the problem is not the two party system but what the universal chattering class has turned it into. Mirror time, idiots.
Absolutely! I ranted many times we need a third party because the first party and the second party are really mostly a one-party system, aka the ‘uniparty/GOPe/dems’ and why this country is such a mess.
Perhaps this MAGA movement the past year will give us that three-party system the commie rag NYT is afraid of.
You can’t blame the rats for a national debt of $36,000,000,000,000.
With a well-informed, well-educated, highly engaged electorate, either “two-party” or “multi-party” democracy would work.
(And yes, I know America is a constitutional republic... but that’s a form of democracy.)
The part of the system that is broken is We The People. Far too few of us actually PARTICIPATE in our self-government. We’re too busy chasing after our livelihood and our entertainment to make self-government a priority.
The $36T started with the deal GWB made with the democrats to get his Iraq war, give me muh war and you can have whatever you want - the trifecta of globalism, socialism and crony capitalism.
We have a group in GA called the Georgia Republican Assembly. One of their key guys self-describes as “We’re the Republican wing of the Republican Party.”
He’s not wrong.
They’re big on holding Republican elected officials to stated Republican positions.
The uniparty is real..
It’s all built on the 17th Amendment. Till the 17th Amendment is repealed and the Senior Executive Service eliminated, the game will continue
What they need to do is take out the institutionalization with laws and funding of a “two-party” system. Make it easier for candidates from more parties or no parties to make it on the ballot.
Indeed so, America went downhill exactly at that time, will never forget the “energy” deal Boosch made with Nanzi in 1997 for exchange for $$$ in Iraq - it spurred the closing of manufacturers of all the appliances, furniture etc. made in this country and sent to the Chicoms. It is this that made what we call the “Uniparty.”
Even Theodore Roosevelt was unable to win under a third party banner. The others, from La Follette in 1924 to Perot in 1992 and 1996, are just footnotes in almanacs. The best hope is for THE MAGA movement to steadily eliminate moderates from Republican ranks.
Term limits.
If you want more representative government, repeal the 17th, and cap the number of people that each congressional rep can represent at some low number like 25,000 or 50,000 so the size of the House grows to stadium size and each house seat is more responsive and representative to individual constituents.
The NYT doesn’t want that though. They want a Congress that will punish Trump and fund wars in Ukraine.
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