sycasey said:
Big C said:
sycasey said:
Eastern Oregon Bear said:
HawaiiBear33 said:
You have to read 13 posts to get the gist but their system really sucks. Our system is not perfect but holy crap they are sctewed by a horrible process.
Just learning about the Parliamentary form of government?
Pssst… that's how England and most any country that was in the British Commonwealth and has a Prime Minister operates. The US is an exception, not the rule, though in a similar vein, Congress selects their Party Leaders to run the show the same way as Canada selects their Prime Minister.
It's also worth noting that when the US was helping Germany and Japan set up their own democratic systems after WW2, we recommended a system more like this and not like ours. The Presidential system we have basically quashes 3rd parties and sets us up for polarization.
We are polarized these days, but in theory, a two-party system might have both parties vying for the center.
Of course, that assumes there is a "center". It's a little different these days when so many people can choose content that reinforces what they want to believe.
Yeah, and in truth we've seen US politics go from more "center consensus" to "polarized" and back again. So we might just be in a polarized moment and the worm will turn again.
It's true that having a directly-elected President as head of government and head of state does tend to squash third parties, though. You have one party to support the President's agenda and one to oppose it, and those who are outside of that find it easier to just fall in with one of those two sides than to try making a viable third party. Even when a third party does rise successfully (like the Republicans under Lincoln), it just winds up replacing one of the other major parties (bye bye Whigs).
Almost impossible to launch a successful third party in the US, but if it were to happen, I'd like to see a "common sense" party that avoided the bs from both sides. As most folks know, I am probably left-of-center, but there's a fair amount of bs on the left (to go with a
whole lot on the right).
If somebody wants to say hey, there's some on the right, but a
whole lot more on the left, okay fine, I respect that: you can be the right wing of my new Common Sense party.