Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with some rather shady financial deals) political parties regularly go out of business if they fuck up strong enough. And this system will likely also fix the current problems over time, resulting in possibly less bad state.

Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.

I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.

Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.

I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?

There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing.

The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september.

I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year.

Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.

This.

There are in fact many parties in the USA. But unfortunately the USA is still using an early alpha release voting system that was invented in the 1700s before voting theory had been even understood.

The result of a majority win voting system is that it only legitimizes 2 parties in practice. This worked 'ok' so long as the 2 parties acted in good faith.

However the last 20-30 years the Republican party got twisted into a movement to undermine government, enrich themselves, and narrowly focus on a couple of right-wing Christian interests to distract a populist base. They've maintained their relevance by turning Fox news and other right-wing owned outlets into effectually state-run propaganda machines. Leaving only the Democrats trying to govern with the Republicans trying to undermine and obstruct that very government.

The only way out of the USA's problems is to have a modern preference voting method, or in the long term the country may be doom to fail.

I almost always for an Nth party, where N>2. Literally every single election, I’ve been told that I was wasting my vote, that this was the most important election of my life, etc. There is a tremendous amount of social pressure to vote mainstream. I don’t have high hopes of breaking the cartel anytime soon.

I think the pressure mostly comes from the value that if you're in favor of an outcome, you should be in favor of the prerequisite actions to that outcome. If your favored actions are counterproductive to your favored outcome, then it strikes others as irrational.