Sans wedge issues, there is a solid American consensus out there and it trends populist, and does so for simple economic reasons.
Entirely entirely unrealistic and would go nowhere. Both sides love their wedges. They campaign on they both saber rattle with, they make their careers on them. When they have a chance to make movement, they usually don’t, if they fixed the issue it wouldn’t raise money anymore.
Look how many people already say there is a UniParty when looking at pretty shitty things like both sides voting for Iraq war, Patriot Act, meager amounts of citizen Covid relief compared to corporate interests... so take away the wedge issues and the two parties may look far more similar.
I’d like to see viable third and fourth party options. No decent person can be entirely red or blue.
I have quit responding to labels directly and nearly always move to clarity first and foremost.
Uniparty?
Usually this is met with either righteous indignation, or a hard pass, or agreement of some kind.
When I ask, "how so?", I tend to understand the other person better and have an opportunity to have a respectable, sometimes productive dialog.
Re: more parties
I agree with you. Sadly, I do not believe those party options make much sense in our current system.
And it is the system, meaning changing it will require similar effort as it does to get anything else done, so...
I feel factions, blocs, caucuses can serve a similar role. On the right, the Tea Party was quite effective. Not endorsement, just noting dynamics that apply here.
The economic left is contemplating similar ways and means.
The other tool we do have is collective action. Class type moves that can deliver very significant incentive to change.
That center is always moving: over the last 30 years, the economic center has moved rightward (see Bill Clinton and the "Third Way", or the tax rate of the top bracket), while the social center has moved leftwards (see public opinion of interracial marriages and LGBTQ unions). On both axes, the US center is right of center, compared to the rest of the world.
Ie: Let's make sure everyone sees the doctor without going bankrupt or being denied for lack of money
, or
relitigate the SCOTUS decision gun ownership being an individual right, and like all rights, is not absolute, subject to reasonable regulation.
Pick one.
And one is all we get due to how politics currently works in our US system. As for changing it? Same priority discussion.
Without our people being able to express consensus in a potent way, we basically ignore them right now. No judgement there, just hard reality.
How do we want to play it then?
So far, these kinds of conversations have been super interesting! They often go pretty well. The core idea is being for something we have majority consensus on rather than burn time on things we don't.
Expressing all this stuff in terms of priorities could be a way to get past how toxic it all is.
What I will say is quid pro, pro. Get health care sorted and we all can have a much lower cost, lower risk conversation about guns...
I still love the idea a little bit, federal abortion and gun laws have moved only incrementally in the last 20 years and yet they've prevented coalitions surrounding so many other pressing issues from forming.
In ancient Athens they used to try to make laws like that. They would create a penalty for bringing up certain ideas like melting down golden statues in their temples for money or proposing ideas that disasterously failed in the past. These laws had a tendency to be broken though.
I and friends have for a few years discussed the idea of freezing all gun and abortion laws in place for 20 years as a means to declawing the US parties' stranglehold on dialogue.