American's lax attitude towards cultivating more than two parties is literally killing the republic from the inside.

You'd think a country that played a central role in a global, decades-long unstable regime of bipolar power that routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear oblivion would know better than to have a bipolar electoral system

> routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear oblivion

I'm struggling to think of a reason why this is anything but bad faith nonsense.

have you never heard of the many times we almost came to setting off full scale nuclear warfare because of the bipolar power war of the ussr v usa et.al.?

the only thing that saved us was cooler heads that prevailed on both sides.

Why would throwing more actors with similar capabilities into the mix make the situation any more stable though? That seems like basically the old European Balance of Power, which broke out into open conflict more frequently.

I take the view that the European balance of power probably broke out into open conflict often because of hidden alliances that made it hard for states to correctly gauge the costs of engaging in such conflict.

In the field International Relations, there's lots of discussion around the stability (or instability) of a bipolar distribution of power. Your stance is closer to neorealists, mine is maybe closer to classical realists. Have fun reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_(international_relati... and related links

But from a game theory perspective, having only two powers turns everything into a zero-sum game. I argue that leads to less cooperation and increased divisiveness. Not agreeing with Republicans means you must be a Democrat in their eyes. This "us versus them" mentality is somewhat tribal and leaves little room for nuance.

If I had a magic want, the US would have a 4 party system. Like a cartesian plane with civil liberalism <-> conservatism on one axis and economic liberalism <-> conservatism on the other axis

> Classical realist theorists, such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, hold that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems, as great powers can gain power through alliances and petty wars that do not directly challenge other powers; in bipolar systems, classical realists argue, this is not possible.

I suppose they must account for this somehow but isn't that exactly what a series of proxy wars in far-flung places between the United States and the Soviet Union were?

It's been almost 20 years since I studied any of that, but those proxy wars in far-flung places did directly challenge other powers because of the Domino theory

I don't necessarily agree with Morgenthau and Carr as I think most IR Theory is bullshit made up by academia... particularly the stuff around how players "gain power"

So I make my own argument which mostly hinges on the idea that two powers really means "my power" vs. "everyone else" which is not a recipe for peace

Isn't World War 1 a counterexample? Lots of parties, but they aggregated into two competing coalitions.

This balance is the central theme of the seminal work in the field (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm52s). It may or may not be correct but is one of the most influential texts on the subject.

I've not heard how many times, no. How many times was it?

Luckily there's a whole article on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

That's all nuclear incidents ever, not just US/USSR. US/USSR count from that page is more like 10 incidents across 40 years. Some of them occuring within days of others, they're that fine-grained.

I wouldn't call that a "routine" matter.

It isn't an attitudinal problem, it is the logical outcome of our political systems. In political science it is known as Duverger's law: single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend toward a two party equilibrium.

Changing this requires states to adopt alternative systems, which can sometimes mean amending state constitutions. It isn't easy or straightforward, and the general sense is that there are better things to spend that effort on.

> single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend toward a two party equilibrium.

I'm not convinced it's quite that simple.

For example, Canada also has a first-past-the-post electoral system - yet political parties here have come and gone. And continue to do so.

Parties come and go, but there will be two major parties. In fact under such as system if you're in one of those two big parties and you see a third party rising you need to figure out whether it's you or the other guys getting replaced, 'cos it won't stay a three party system for long.

For example in the UK, the Tories ("Conservative and Unionist Party") and Labour are currently the biggest parties, but a hundred years ago this was a novel situation, Labour were seen as a third party, while the Liberal party (which was eventually absorbed into what is today "Liberal Democrats") had seen success over decades and were often in government prior to that point.

I mean we're on the sixth "party system" in the US too, if that's your standard (it's a new "party system" when there's a significant realignment of which interests find themselves in which parties, either by a reshuffle among existing parties, or by new parties rising and old ones falling). Have you heard much about the Federalists or Whigs lately?

The voting demographics change frequently as well. California has voted to elect more republican presidents than it has democrat ones. It’s voted democrat in the previous 8 elections. In the 10 elections prior to that, 9 times it voted for republican candidates. Texas has also voted for more democrat presidential candidates than republican ones. People who think the US democracy is a rigid and highly predictable system simply have a recency bias.

A lot of it depends on whether your governing coalitions are formed before or after the election.

The US parties are just coalitions of disparate interests joining together until they (maybe) represent enough people to have a majority and be able to enact their collective interests.

In some other countries the different interest groups sort themselves into two factions after being elected but I don't know that it is really that different in practice.

It's not different, or rather it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes. I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments. You end up with ruling coalitions which are typically pretty awful.

Ironically, America has one of the most open political systems. You register as one party or the other and vote in primaries. This has lead to a huge variety of people replacing hated mainstream politicians. That's way more than you can say for many other countries.

The two parties are essentially coalitions.

Anecdotally, a recurring theme in conversations I've had while living abroad is the desire to prune or consolidate some parties.

While both sides in the US have big tents, they are effective in whipping votes when things need to get done.

It also helps that detracting coalition partners can't torpedo their leadership. Historically, factions within a party, like Blue dog dems or Tea partiers, had to wait for an election to litigate their grievances.

Well, yes, this was where I was going. The coalition is just formed before the election takes place. I live in a city with "nonpartisan" elections and I feel like it mostly just makes it difficult to understand what candidates in local elections even stand for.

Agreed, when I lived in Austin the non partisan elections for city council made me feel ill informed come election day.

It just fueled apathy for me: there's only so much research one can do with limited press coverage and personal time constraints. Shrug.

>it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes

It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.

>I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments.

That's an impossibly high bar. The standard we're talking about is whether it's better than a two party system.

> It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.

You think logrolling doesn't happen in the American system? Parties are made up of factions who will entertain each other's preferred priorities, which is the exact same thing you're describing except that the parties of the various factions are nominally the same. There's no real natural or obvious philosophical reason why your position on gun ownership should imply a position on environmental regulation, religion, infrastructure buildings, racial politics, abortion, tax policy, and more. We're so used to the groupings that they seem natural but if we go back and looking at older American party systems you'll see parties that don't 100% map onto the contemporary ones, with a blend of some elements we would think of as fitting and others we wouldn't.

I never said it didn't happen. Don't do that.

It's unquestionably a different dynamic. If the party is in power, then the party is in power. Period. They have less incentive to listen to smaller factions. Do they? I sure hope so. But it's not the same.

Furthermore, these internal deals are more likely to be kept private since theres no benefit to airing everything to the press, the public and the opposition.

In a multi-party system almost all those deals are public. Thus, voters can decide if everyone lived up to their promise.

That's just not true. If you want a recent example go look at the protracted battle to elect a Speaker of the House.

In some ways it might be worse. Here we had a party that promised to vote with one faction and partly thanks to it survived the election. A few months later they did a 180 and voted the other faction into government. Opinions aside, imagine voting for Sanders only for him to elect Trump or the other way around. With that said, two party version also comes with major flaws.

IIRC Some states you cannot vote outside your declared party (Washington)

That's only for primaries, which traditionally were only open to members of a party.

It's just different order of operations on coalition building. Other systems divide into a majority and opposition at some point. In the US it just happens earlier, but there is the same diversity of opinions within those groups.

Majority? Probably. Vast majority? No way. If that were true we'd not keep switching parties between presidents. And Florida, a mostly independent voter state, wouldn't have had DeSantis win in a landslide when he just barely tied last time around.

That's attributable to turnout.

You tell me if 90% is a "vast" majority or not. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...