> In the USA's particular case, you have 2 parties which, despite the claimed differences, wind up representing the exact same interests.

They aren't exactly the same interests. Because real preferences are multidimensional and the US electoral system has strong structural features which promote a two-party system (with differences that lie on a single dimension), for people whose most important issues don't lie on the axis of variation between the parties, they can seem similar, but they don't represent the exact same interests.

The Washington Consensus cast a long shadow. With regard to high finance, international politics and military activity the parties are effectively the same (though the GOP may have closer ties to OPEC). Most American voters feel very strongly about these issues.

And how do you explain the legalization of marijuana. No politicians or mustache twirlers want it to happen and yet it keeps occurring.

I think they just realized that the legalization of it will keep people distracted, whereas the continued prohibition of it would cause social unrest.

What we're 'allowed' to do is basically anything that keeps us too occupied to overthrow the ruling class...

Wouldn't "they" get more mileage from an outright endorsement of drug use? Get the people on their side?

You're just rationalizing.

You're ignoring the history of prohibition (of alcohol and drugs) and the 'war on drugs'. Not to mention the 70's, the connection between recreational drugs and 'hippies' (a subversive anti-war class). Not to mention the fact that up to now the 'war on drugs' has also been used to restrict the rights of certain social classes (it's been well documented how the laws are designed to criminalize certain classes/ethnicities disproportionately).

Guns, encryption, alternate political parties, at some point you have too many people that would have to be in on your conspiracy.

I doubt that most politicians or mustache twirlers are terribly concerned that marijuana legalization distracts people from, say, domestic spying or military interventions.

Or a million other things the monied interests fight and have lost like the ACA, EPA regulations, OSHA, privatizing social security, invading Syria and Iran, etc.

When it comes to politics HN is conspiracy kiddie central. The US has a real two party system on top of dozens of state and local jurisdictions, all part of a larger checks and balance system. Sadly, I see a lot of criticism from Chinese and Russians who want to badly equate their broken autocratic system with our system, and that just isn't correct.

If you want to see democracy look at western countries that have more than 2 parties, where minority governments are viable, and where there's actual representation. Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, etc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#/media/File:EIU...

The US is NOT the paragon of democracy.

Just because you have more than two parties doesn't mean you have more "freedom" or more "democracy." Most of those nations fall into a two party system with marginal 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties often on the very far extremist end. So we have politics like one of the larger parties courting white supremacists and fascists to get the votes they need, with some terrible concessions involved.

In a two party system, the small extremists can't win enough seats to be of note. That's a feature, not a bug. As we have seen many times before in the US's history, small movements move up through the party primary process. So you have the best of both worlds: a lack of easy access to government by extremists and a path to changing one of the larger parties via the very democratic primary system.

I don't think the US system is perfect, but its good; it solves a lot of problems of governing very nicely. The framers did their homework. The idea that Euro-style parliamentary systems are unequivocal better is a questionable premise, especially since it did nothing to stop the rise of Nazism in Germany (or even protect the lives of the Jewish minority) and other lesser but significant social failures (Greece's white supremacist Golden Dawn winning 22 seats in parliament recently for example.)

Not to mention, the States are fairly autonomous by Euro standards, so the state level legislature/courts/constitution are actually important and not just the bureaucratic/administrative arm of the national government. That gives a lot more local representation than the generally top-down decrees of Euro states - and that's on top of whatever the hell the EU is and all of its trans-national top-down decrees.