this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Yeah, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how things function. Did we end up with one party when the Whigs party went away? No. We had the Republican party become the other major player.
We need more than two parties, not fewer. We just need those parties to ideally be further left, where the majority of Americans are. One party systems you end up without any dissenting voice to speak up when something wrong is being done, so they are allowed to do whatever they want and end up dominating the people. A better system of voting allows voting based on what people actually want, not strategy, so there are a larger variety of voices more closely representing the people.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand how things function. If the Republican party is destroyed, Republican voters will fracture into multiple parties, dividing conservative voters and making it impossible for any one of the new parties to compete with the Democrats in our winner-take-all, first-past-the-post electoral system. The federal government would become a defacto single party system, with the Democrats being that party. Conservatives likely would coalesce around a new single party and join efforts to try and take on the Democrats, but that party would exist to do nothing but obstruct, like the Republican party today. So we would once again be in a situation where there is one party trying to represent a plurality of Americans and an opposition party trying to obstruct everything that party wants to do.
If we want a system of plurality and proportional representation, it would require changing not only the US constitution, but 50 state constitutions as well. How do you propose accomplishing that with two parties competing for control, when one of those parties wants only to obstruct?
Sure, over a short enough time frame, that's true. However, the power vaccum would quickly be filled by another party, and thus most people wouldn't consider the US to have a single-party system. It's the same way how you don't breathe in the time between every exhale and inhale, but people don't consider you to have "stopped breathing" because that's not a very useful conceptualization.
Which I acknowledged. Or did you stop reading after "defacto single party system?"
No, it's just that I didn't notice the part where you admitted you were wrong, so I felt the need to explain why you weren't correct.
Oh is that what you think you did? Interesting.