The US forms coalitions too, and that's actually part of the problem. Both the democrats and republicans have subparties within them. It is really more accurate to think of democrats and republicans as coalitions. That's why we have people like Bernie being so different from Biden. Or Trump, tea party, and neo libs, being far from classical conservatives. All of which are republicans.
I think comparing the US to others is often a bad comparison. Most others have coalitions and you'll find that two coalitions dominate. In the US parties act as coalitions. We can see the wide range in opinions from people like Warren/Sanders/AOC compared to those like Pelosi/Biden/Harris. Even in the Republican side you have this massive division, though they've been more effective lately at achieving a party over principle strategy. So two coalitions isn't really any better than what's here in the US because it is in essence the same thing.
Agree, and then youbhave the practical situation of the GOP basically being at least two, if not three, different parties. Same kind of goes for the dems. Other countries do the coalition forming in parliament, the US does it before elections.
Consider this - in Germany, are the Greens and the SPD really that different? In Canada, are the Liberals and New Democrats really all that different? In many countries what happens is that these slightly nuanced parties end up in coalition governments anyway. Which could be a good thing as a party can be formed around a single issue and can strongly advocate in coalition for that issue.
In the US, both dominate parties are actually coalitions that would be separate parties in other countries. It isn't perfect, and these factions sometimes have serious disagreements, but within the Dems we generally believe we are stronger together. The Republican party is going through a serious reckoning between its traditional base and a more extreme wing. It won't surprise me if Democrats go through something similar in about another decade as Gen Z comes of age and wants to push their agenda faster than the traditional moderates within the party.
There is no reason coalitions could not be possible in the US legislative branch. You could argue that they existed here in the 1950s and 1960s, to some extent, when the parties were so race-scrambled that there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (i.e. there were effectively 4 parties in the US at the time).
The two major American political parties should really be viewed as coalitions of a number of single or few issue parties. It's an issue of semantics, but it also explains how our parties can swing so wildly over time on certain issues -- the composition of the coalition has simply changed. The minor parties are either in one of these two coalitions or are effectively out on their own.
What Americans are really saying here is that neither coalition is really working for them and they're looking for some other new coalitions to form. It's particularly acute at the moment with the Republican party where the fractures are fairly clear and have been forming for the last few decades. However, the Democratic party also has fissures and it may explain why it's turned into such a gerontocracy as the old guard seek to keep the the coalition together.
In either case, the minor parties of either major probably won't seek to break away unless they believe they can form a new coalition (major) party that will win at the polls.
What I think many Americans would hope, if really pressed, would be a center-right party (by American thinking of left-right politics) that ejects the more extreme right wing concerns and pulls enough of the center-left to win while also filtering out more classic left-wing politics. Where that center-left comes from? I would wager mostly various highly religious, but not necessarily evangelical, groups made heavily of recent or second generation minority immigrant groups who tend to be more conservative in thinking but pushed to align with the Democratic party because of all the race hating nonsense in the Republican party. Some of these groups have been test migrating to the Republican party over the last generation simply because the Democratic party isn't coherent in its ability to absorb multiple competing ethical and moral frameworks, but I would bet that those groups are generally unhappy being in the same room as all the anti-<insert religious ethnic group> people who don't like them and are looking for better aligned identity.
Like any great American political institution, such a party would continue to be decades behind the political thought in Europe, left of most of Asia without the long-term thinking, and be paradoxically highly inclusive of race and religion while intolerant of real social progress.
But the 45% party and the 10% party form a coalition because their platforms are more closely aligned to one another than either is with that of the second 45% party, right?
Isn't that exactly what we have in our current 2-party system, with factions forming coalitions against the other groups that they most disagree with?
Might the only difference be that, on one side of the Atlantic, the individual factions have explicit names while the coalitions go unlabeled, and on the other side of the Atlantic we explicitly name the coalitions while the factions they comprise go (mostly) unlabeled?
Sorry, I'm not going to Moldbug for a refutation of the concept of coalition voting or the idea that America's two political parties are an expression of coalition voting. The notion that the Democratic and Republican parties are and have been coalitions is extremely mainstream. If you want to challenge it, find a non-fringe source who's making that argument clearly and directly, and I'll read it.
Not sure why the downvotes. A consequence of our two-party system is that both parties end up being uneasy coalitions of many different "parties."
The Republicans have long been an uneasy coalition of the religious right, paleoconservatives, fascists, economic libertarians, right leaning neocons and neoliberals, and mid-century centrist "Eisenhower conservatives." Major fault lines have been between the libertarians and the religious right and between the neocons and the paleocons and nativists.
The Democrats have long been an uneasy coalition of left leaning neocons and neoliberals, social libertarians, anti-war activists, minorities who feel threatened by Republican tolerance of racism and nativism in their "big tent," atheists and minority religions who feel threatened by the religious right, and socialists. Major fault lines have been between the socialists and the various economic centrist or libertarian factions, between socially conservative minorities and the social liberals, and between the neocons / neoliberals and the anti-war / anti-empire factions.
Each party contains at least three or four other parties within.
A shuffle seems to be happening right now where the nativist, paleocon, and fascist parts of the Republican Party have gained power at the expense of the neocons and neoliberals after the latter discredited themselves with the Iraq war disaster and the 2008 financial bailout shitshow (which can technically be blamed on both parties since Obama presided over some of it).
Another shuffle occurring is that libertarianism has really taken a hit as a result of anxiety over wealth distribution and issues with globalism and neoliberalism. Many libertarians on the right have been converted to the alt-right/fascist side, and on the left quite a few have gone further left economically and joined the AOC wing of the party.
At the very least I wish the parties would split themselves.
The Democrats seems to have both a socdem wing and a more neoliberal wing and the Republicans a growing right wing populist wing and the standard neocons. Maybe this is oversimplified, but I feel like these should be different parties
The two biggest problems in US politics are the two-party system and unproprotional representation.
I mean, even in European countries it's hard to say you support a specific party (e.g. the Greens in Germany), because you'll never agree with 100% of their politics. Just having two parties and needing to commit to one? That's fucking insane.
It's just different order of operations on coalition building. Other systems divide into a majority and opposition at some point. In the US it just happens earlier, but there is the same diversity of opinions within those groups.
Your point about 'coalitions of candidates' is a great point. This is how the Tea Party is succeeding in taking over the Republican Party at this point, which has led the Republicans in Congress to being far more intransigent than they normally had before.
Both major political parties in the USA are coalitions representing many groups of people with separate interests. It is in the interest of these groups to combine their resources when their goals tend to either align, or at least not conflict with each other.
The U.K. doesn’t use coalitions. They are an anomaly in the U.K. There has only been one since WW2. U.K. is typically a de facto two party state. If anything, our recent problems are due to both parties consistently failing to supply an effective leader, which is an inherent weakness of a two party system.
The two American parties are effectively composed of roughly a dozen factions that just pretend to be unified parties at election time.
Look at the fate of the Ryancare/Trumpcare bill. Republicans control all branches of government, yet they can't even agree to vote on a piece of legislation that was a core campaign promise for the last eight years.
It would feel more honest towards voters if the Republican umbrella were split into actual separate parties: "Economic Liberalists", "Moderate Right", "America First Economic Nationalists", "White Nationalists", etc.
It's inevitable with a two party system. If the US had 20 parties there would be a political tradition to form coalitions. Liberals forming a government with far right Christians- the best medicine for ideology is Machiavellian pragmatism.
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