Somebody please tell me why we need the two-party system....

What do you suggest as an alternative?

The American public has very deep divisions andpassionate disagreements that make one party rule an impossibility. Three party rule is unbalanced (giving one the advantage) and four party rule will turn into two party rule as coalition is the only way to succeed in politics.

Two party rule is the natural state of things when you have a deeply divided electorate.

i'm pretty sure some of the neo-cons in washington would be very happy with one party rule

I dont like the winner take all political system. Parties should receive representation in proprtion to votes received imo. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8219

I don't believe for a moment that: "Two party rule is the natural state of things when you have a deeply divided electorate." England long had a "two party system" in which the Whigs represented the power of the wealthy middle and upper class of merchants, manufacturers and successful capitalists with "vested interests, while the Tories represented the power of the landed aristocracy, and those among the successful capitalists who aspired to the same style of life, and who made their pile by exploiting land ownership and enclosure. The natural consequence of that, in an era in which modern, disciplined political parties such as we know today did not yet exist, was the rise of the Labour Party, which eventually destroyed the Whig heritage, and actually lead to the rebirth of the power of the Tories, when Labour was unable to seize the House of Commons.

The reality in the United States is, however, that we have a two party system, and they have done all that they possibly can, using the advantages of modern, disciplined political parties, to enshrine a two party system, and prevent the rise of a viable third party. That is the reality which any objection to the current system ignores, and a reality which likely means that this is not going to change any time soon, and, i suspect, will not change in the lifetimes of any of those who are reading here.

A deeply divided electorate seems to be rather the result than the cause of a two-party system. IMHO.

And there are many examples of what amount to three-, four-, five- or more party systems that seem to be doing just fine, so there's definitely no lack of alternatives.

(Have you been following the Dutch elections, ebrown? Here's an interesting post in nimh's thread........)

Setanta is probably right. It is unlikely that an alternative to the two party state will be successful anytime in the near future. This is not to say that there is no viable alternative, it just means that the current system is too well entrenched to be replaced easily. I think a one-party state would be preferable to what we have now, provided that certain restrictive measures were set in place. You can have checks and balances without having two ideologically opposed parties vying for control.

Glad you enjoyed that post, OE

It's surely interesting - I was just rereading it now, and several times realised just how completely estranging it must be for someone coming from a US perspective. The language, the definitions, the positionings, even dress, are all just that 90 degrees turn different. But thats what makes it interesting, I hope :smile:

We need a voters bill of rights, and the most major piece of that has to be runoff elections, i.e. a guarantee that nobody like SlicKKK KKKlintler will ever hold a political office with less than 50% of the vote, and that nobody will ever need fear voting for his first choice, at least on a first ballot.

There needs to be a foolproof guarantee that voting fraud is impossible, and that has to be some sort of a system of tracing every vote back to whoever cast it.

There should be a "none of the above" choice on any ballot for a public office and whenever "none of the above" wins, the other candidates should be barred for life from running for public office, and the parties which sponsored them should be barred for 20 years from running candidates for that particular office.

Until we have runoff elections, no third party has any chance of making it in America. All a voter is doing by voting for a third party candidate until then is casting a vote for his least favorite choice.

Without Perot, Clinton wins by more than five points over Bush.

The idea that Perot's votes go to Bush is one of the fantasies the Right has been suckling on for quite awhile now. Well, some have moved on, but some have not. As the above post illustrates.

I don't think that one is knowable, but I'd like to eliminate the question mark in such cases one way or another.

What we DO know is that SlicKKK KKKlintler held the presidency for eight years without ever having more than about 42% of the vote.

Bullshit. Bill Clinton got 49,3% of the vote in the 1996 presidential elections.

In that year, Dole got 40,7% and Perot 8,4%, which means that even the two combined had less than Clinton got. (Further runners up were Ralph Nader at 0,7% and the Libertarian candidate at 0,5%).

I am, however, all for a "None of the Above" option.

A four party coalition is better than than the two-party system as the latter tends to have extremists of the victorious party set the agenda. Democrats once in office gradually moves tothe extreme left while the Republicans to the extreme right thus creating exteme swings from left to right. With four parties and two opposing coalitions the coalitions tend to moderate as extremists in the major party would be objected to by the minor coalition partner

I am a registered Libertarian. The Libertarians became a major party in Massachusetts when their candidates garnished 8% of the vote for state treasurer, 7% for governor and a whooping 20% against Ted Kennedy for Senate. The two party system no longer works.

It's not only knowable, it has been demonstrated.

When you say that one candidate splits the vote, it means that if the independent candidate somehow disappeared, the position of one of the remaining candidates would improve significantly over his opponent.

Okay, let's look at the record. Just before the Democratic convention in 1992, the candidates-Bush, Clinton and Perot-were roughly even in the polls. Republicans were claiming that Perot was taking votes away from Bush. However, just before the convention, Perot withdrew-and Clinton surged to a twenty-three point lead (!) over Bush.

Yes, a convention does give a candidate a "bounce"-but that bounce is usually about five or seven points, not twenty-three. Clearly, the size of Clinton's enormous lead was due to Perot's withdrawal.

Now, how would that be possible if Perot was taking support away from Bush? It wouldn't be.

Later on in the campaign, Perot re-entered. What happened? Clinton's large lead over Bush began to erode. He finally won, but not by the large margin he had. If Perot was taking votes from Bush, his re-entry into the race would widen Clinton's lead over Bush. Instead, it narrowed it.

Four years later, Perot ran again. This time he got half the percentage he got the first time. Did the Republican candidate gain as a result? No, the opposite happened-Clinton's margin of victory over his Republican opponent increased.

The two times Perot either left the race or his support diminished, Clinton's lead over the Republican got larger. The one time Perot re-entered the race, Clinton's lead over the Republican got smaller. Perot took votes from Clinton-not Bush.

The Republican belief that Perot caused Bush I to lose is a myth-but it is a myth that they will forever hold onto.

Earlier, Atavistic referred to a one party system. We have had that before. The political party formed by Jefferson was the Democratic-Republican Party. But it was a party which was organized from the top down. At times, as many as five or six Democratic-Republicans would run on a ticket for national office. In 1800, an equal number of electors voted for Jefferson and for Aaron Burr, but Hamilton disliked and distrusted Burr, and so threw Federalist support to Jefferson in the House of Representatives, giving Jefferson the victory. Jefferson was succeeded by Madison, and Madison was succeeded by Monroe in 1816. In 1820, the Federalist Party was almost non-existant. Disaffected members of the Democratic-Republicans since the defeat of Burr in the House had attempted, unsuccessfully, to create a national party, usually calling themselves Republicans. The Federalists were not able to keep a national profile, because they were also a party organized from the top down, and had become associated in the public mind with Hamilton and unpopular financial policies which had been seen since the time of Washington as favoring the wealthy merchant. (Nevertheless, Hamilton's fiscal policies had put the United States on a sound economic footing in the first year of Washington's first term.)

In 1820, there was no real opposition to Monroe. John Quincy Adams ran against Monroe, but as a "National Republican," with no party organization. The Federalists fielded no candidate at all. Adams got just over 17,000 votes, but no electors. Seventeen Federalist electors were chosen (some states still appointed electors in the legislature, instead of choosing them with a popular vote), but sixteen of them voted for Monroe, because there was no Federalist candidate. One Federalist elector cast his vote for Adams. In 1824, Adams ran again, and ran as a Democratic Republican. There were four candidates for office, and every one of them was a Democratic-Republican. Andrew Jackson took the most popular votes, and the most electoral votes, but not a majority. The election was thrown into the House, which chose John Quincy Adams. Jackson was disillusioned, and angry, and he went back to Tennessee to rebuild his political base. He took his own method and spread it to the other states. This was a party built from the ground up, with "ward heelers," precinct committeemen, county and state committees. He swept up the disaffected elements of the Democratic-Repulicans, those who had voted for him, and those who had been angered when their own candidates had thrown their votes to Adams. That was the birth of the modern Democratic Party, and it had far more organization and discipline than any political party which had ever been seen before. It made the Democrats powerful at all levels of government: local, county, state and national.

Adams attempted to get re-elected, but he was steamrollered by Jackson's new party organization. Adams didn't give up, and attempted to revive his National Republican Party, but the effort failed miserably, because, once again, he attempted to organize it from the top down. It lacked the coherent and wide-spread organization of the Democrats, and it lacked the party loyalty which characterized Jackson's organization. (In Jackson's party, political preferment was tied to loyalty to the Party and to Jackson; and, later, to Martin Van Buren, who had become Jackson's second Vice President because of his unfailing loyalty to Jackson.) The modern Republican Party was created by young men disillusioned with Adams, but impressed with Jackon's party organization, even if they despised him personally.

The first Republican President Was Lincoln, and he was only able to win in 1860 because the Democratic ticket was split. Running against Stephen Douglas for the Senate, in a race which he lost, Lincoln had forced Douglas to take a stand on slavery, which was sufficiently unpopular in Illinois that Douglas was forced to condemn "the peculiar institution." Douglas won the Senate seat, but in 1860, the Democratic Party split. The former Vice President, John Breckenridge, ran as a "southern Democrat," and won most of the support of the Party, because Douglas' stand against slavery had alienated party loyalists in the South. Those members of the Democrats in the North who did not want to vote for Douglas voted for Lincoln. Breckenridge actually won more votes, both popular and electoral, than Douglas, but not enough to defeat Lincoln. However, the combined Democratic votes of Douglas and Breckenridge would have buried Lincoln if the Party's vote had not been split.

In 1864, Lincoln won a landslide in the electoral college, but his popular vote margin over McClellan was only 55% to 45%--so the Democrats were not dead in the North by any means. After the war, and until 1980, the Democrats had a political "split-personality" as they kept a grip on political power in states North and South--appealing to farmers and organized labor in the North, and to the virulently anti-Republican "old guard" in the South. In the era of the civil rights movement, the Democrats split again as in 1860, with "Dixiecrat" candidates running against the Democratic Party because of Kennedy's support of the civil rights movement (which was more apparent than real--the FBI investigated and spread discrediting information about civil rights workers and leaders).

Ross Perot's third party failed for the same reason that Adams failed to organize a creditable opposition to Andrew Jackson. It was organized from the top down. When his party organized at the local level, and defied his wishes, he fired people who could have been crucial to its effort to establish a third party, and party supporters became disillusioned and drifted away.

There will not be a third or fourth party in this country until one or more parties are successfully organized from the ground up and take local and state office before they attempt to capture the White House. The Republican Party which survives today was organized in 1854, but did not take the White House until 1860, and then only because the Democrats had split. No third paty in this country will survive organized from the top down by an ego-maniac like Ross Perot.

By the way, a third party could organize very quickly. After his defeat in 1824, Jackson went to work, and in less than a year, there was a Democratic party organization in every state, and in almost every county. If a third party organizes in today's political climate, it would be nearly suicidal to attempt to take the White House the first time out. But if you can elect city councilmen and mayors, and county commissioners and sheriffs and state legislators and governors, you are well on your way to attracting the kind of support which is necessary (in terms of dollars) to elect people to national office. Ross Perot was able to run because he had the cash, and could attract more cash, to pay for a national run. But without the grassroots organization in all the states, his party was doomed, because they had no political power at any level.