Excellent article! You covered enormous amounts of political history and set up your argument well. The problems with the legacy two parties are clearly hurting our national discourse and political functions. The shift toward greater Independent affiliation is a noteworthy development of the past 10-15 years. Some issues behind these shifts relate to the economic structure of society and rapid changes in cultural life brought about by new technologies, particularly social media platforms.
You make the point: "Those who seek a re-invigoration of our storied democracy would find more success in building a foundation for a national movement by turning their focus to the state and local level." This may be true based on the old playbook. However, it may also be possible to build a national movement rapidly, everywhere all at once, using the tech tools of our modern era.
Again, your historical points and modern stats make a solid case that political representation is off. Thank you for providing such a coherent view the political landscape. Great work!!
Not a bad article, but you're missing the MATH of the two party system. It's incredibly stable, because you've always got a party in power and a party trying to get into power. That's why when Federalists formed, their opposition coalesced into the anti-Federalist. The Republicans only became the other half of the duopoly because the Whigs fell apart. For the Forward party to become a major party under our current system would require one of the others to fall apart, presumably the Republicans. This is possible, but a stable multi-party system with winner-take-all elections (doesn't matter if it's RCV, FPTP, or something else) is not. That's just the MATH. The duopoly will continue to win 99% of elections. To disrupt them requires a new strategy. https://americanunion.substack.com/p/disrupting-the-duopoly
Excellent article! You covered enormous amounts of political history and set up your argument well. The problems with the legacy two parties are clearly hurting our national discourse and political functions. The shift toward greater Independent affiliation is a noteworthy development of the past 10-15 years. Some issues behind these shifts relate to the economic structure of society and rapid changes in cultural life brought about by new technologies, particularly social media platforms.
You make the point: "Those who seek a re-invigoration of our storied democracy would find more success in building a foundation for a national movement by turning their focus to the state and local level." This may be true based on the old playbook. However, it may also be possible to build a national movement rapidly, everywhere all at once, using the tech tools of our modern era.
Again, your historical points and modern stats make a solid case that political representation is off. Thank you for providing such a coherent view the political landscape. Great work!!
Not a bad article, but you're missing the MATH of the two party system. It's incredibly stable, because you've always got a party in power and a party trying to get into power. That's why when Federalists formed, their opposition coalesced into the anti-Federalist. The Republicans only became the other half of the duopoly because the Whigs fell apart. For the Forward party to become a major party under our current system would require one of the others to fall apart, presumably the Republicans. This is possible, but a stable multi-party system with winner-take-all elections (doesn't matter if it's RCV, FPTP, or something else) is not. That's just the MATH. The duopoly will continue to win 99% of elections. To disrupt them requires a new strategy. https://americanunion.substack.com/p/disrupting-the-duopoly