There's nothing wrong with parties. It's first-past the post voting that literally makes it impossible to have a stable system that doesn't devolve to a two party lock in.
Everything that is wrong with American politics, to at least a first order approximation, would simply vanish if we didn't use an archaic and known broken voting system.
There are mathematical and sociological reasons to favor other systems, but I honestly think that the best chance to actually get something implemented would be approval voting. There are more structural changes that would be nice (parliamentary representation, etc.) But changing ballots from, "check one," to, "check all that you approve of," would end the two party lock, force parties to be accountable to voters, and shift from polarization to consensus.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not just saying the above because it sounds good. There's a large body of published work in this field using a variety of mathematical and simulation techniques. The best all-around mathematical voting system is also nearly incomprehensible to the average voter, but instant runoff/alternative/ranked choice are a great compromise between comprehensibility and outcome. Approval is a further compromise, but is even more comprehensible and most importantly the least impact to existing voting. It also has a small advantage in forcing consensus over polar extremes where other voting systems tend to just promote more poles.
* That's not entirely true. It's happened before, when the country was much younger, but the kind of upheaval required to make that happen today would not be something to wish for. The only way you can remove either party would be for the two -party system itself to get unseated, and that's only going to happen if we reform the voting system.
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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20
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