Are you saying the two parties are equally to blame? It seems to me that one party is trying to turn the US into a dictatorship while the other is trying to prevent that to happen, and failing.
> Are you saying the two parties are equally to blame?
Even though I agree with the points in your second statement, the counterintuitive conclusion is that the Democrats are slightly more to blame because even after realizing that they're in a losing position, that democracy is at stake, that one-party rule is risked, they still fail to want to fix the voting system, preferring instead to risk losing everything forever.
Both parties contributed to and maintained the status quo, because they both profit from it. Game theory works out and both try to balance their power roughly 50/50 and keep everybody else out of the game.
All topics are polarized to the extreme to fit into the 2 party divide. If a third party would emerge it would be slightly closer to one of the poles. Then it would immediately make that side lose even if more people voted for that position. That is because there is no percentage voting but a cascaded threshold voting. Thus, suppressing underdogs is in the interest of both.
Abstract example:
44% vote party A for X
10% vote party B for X
46% vote party C against X
44% + 10% = 54% for X, but 46% is the biggest party so they win
Question is why the Grand Old Party suddenly quit that century old cartel.
For the record, the equation you noted makes sense only in a first-past-the-post system such as what we have in the US. It does not behave as such in a more advanced voting system, e.g. a ranked-choice system. Also, in a coalition party system, the 54% win.
They're saying the two-party system is to blame. Although one could've hoped that the current situation would've pushed the Democratic Party to work to open it up.
