(10-07-2019, 08:52 AM)TrivialPursuit Wrote:

(10-07-2019, 03:34 AM)JackCity Wrote: Your political system is designed to divide you

And George Washington foresaw it...

I'm not sure he had a great alternative to it... but still - a two party system is doomed to fail. Eventually.

And the more divided we are, the more finger pointing we do; the more the political and financial elite can get away with whatever they want.

I don't like Donald Trump.. but I think he's an old man that sees death coming and wants his legacy to be that he tried to expose and clean up the system he saw firsthand being part of it for decades.

I think Washington and Madison both saw that permanent factionalism would be destructive, but they both also thought the system they designed provided safeguards against it.  Of the two, Madison lived longer and saw enough to start to question his own judgement on that matter.

The US system of selecting a President is unique in that it requires a large, credible organization to be in place in all 50 states before an electoral college majority becomes plausible.  This makes the two large parties basically permanent.

Neither of these parties is really obligated to hold public elections to choose its candidates, but they both do, so, though they are both permanent as an institution, they are extremely unstable in terms of ideology as new candidates invite new voters to participate in each successive primary election.

The inevitable result is both parties show a divide between their old guard and new guard, and both of them look like rank hypocrites over the medium term.  

The only way anything ever gets done is if one party is unified, and wins both chambers of Congress and the white house, or if the President is able to exploit regional or old/new divides within one or both parties in Congress.

Reforming the electoral college could allow one or both existing parties to die and new parties that appear less hypocritical to take their place. 

One solution to hypocrisy is to allow the whole system to be unstable. You could end up like Brazil or France where an inexperienced and unknown person can work his way to the top without any help from the old guard.  He can just create his own party from scratch.

Or you could formally require participation by individuals in the old guard before one can be a candidate for President.  If Trump needed an endorsement from a Senator before he could become a candidate, he would not be President today.  Obvious drawback there is that's an elitist system, and we have been mostly anti-elitist throughout our history

People in the US really seem to enjoy the two year long horserace process to select a new presidential candidate and then have the two candidates face off, and they really seem to enjoy making party loyalty part of their personal identity.  These two things are both ridiculous from an international perspective.  I don't like these things, but, it seems most Americans do like them.

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