I do. Get rid of First Past the Post voting and replace it with something like Approval voting.

As it is, candidates in the middle can't get elected. Two dominant parties is an entirely predictable result of FPTP voting. Approval voting (or ones that tend to elect the Condorcet winner, which also should be the first choice of the median voter) would solve 90% of the problems cited in this article.

I suspect that proportional representation is even more important to establishing a multiparty system that forces cooperation rather than polarization.

I would say almost the opposite.

http://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/a...

But that is a much more significant structural change.

And I'm not convinced "multiparty" is what we want. I think we'd be better off if parties had far less significance. Special interest groups? Sure, they'll exist. People who advocate for, say, bigger vs smaller government, more or less military action abroad, antitrust vs laissez faire, etc. But they don't have to nominate individual candidates...that's really only needed when you have a system that has vote splitting.

That seems like a fine idea to me. How might one actually accomplish it?

Ballot initiatives.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/1...

That would require an assumption that there is something that can be done. I'm not saying we all throw up our hands and die; but any attempt to fix the situation just adds another voice to the echo chamber and doesn't really solve the problem.

As far as I can tell from reading history, it's always been like this. We just haven't had a massive mutually-destructive war in anyone's lifetime to remind us why we should work together. Old soldiers are the best anti-war advocates there are. Because I'm pretty sure that's where all this is headed.

Indeed, looking back through history there's no shortage of reasons for pessimism - Mother Nature certainly left a lot of work for us to do ourselves. But if you're claiming that there isn't also plenty of reasons in history for optimism, you should maybe consider looking through a different lens.

At the risk of sounding glib, this style of thinking sounds a bit too much like the proverbial "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" I mean seriously, while lots of people are drawing attention to these old issues with a modern twist, has anything really been tried to fix them? Perhaps it's going to take some time to get our act together at the political level, but is there anything stopping communities like this from putting on our thinking caps and seeing if we can come up with some new and useful ideas?