[AstroChimpHam]

PG started off talking about the fragmentation in politics, and I wish he would have wrapped that back in at the end. It feels to me like the two party system in the US is dying now as the oligopolistic system of just a few big companies began dying in the 90s.

The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years. Proponents of extreme reform on the other side don't want to vote for a moderate candidate. A Trump vs Clinton election is going to leave too many people without a candidate and force the beginning of the end of the two party system.

[zanny]

What is the end game of first past the post though? Its a predictable state machine, if the GOP fragments too much the democrats will take a supermajority of power in the country, adopt disparate ideals of its own until you rapidly get a newly formed opposition party that all the "anti-dems" rally behind to immediately replace the GOP. Then you can have the dems with an overabundance of conflicting ideals decay from within all the same.

You don't have more than two parties in a stable first past the post system. But that is what the US has always had. It takes a pretty big constitutional amendment to adopt an alternate or transferable vote system. But how do you fix a system where those deciding if they want to fix it are only put into power due to the nature of the system as it exists today?

[humanrebar]

> Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years.

Huh? Libertarians are liberals (small 'l') and what you call evangelicals are (for the most part) social Burkeans. The U.S. happens to have been founded, for the most part, as a liberal state, so the conservative position and the liberal position have historically been on the same side of most issues: welfare, parental rights, religious freedom, education, economic issues, and so on.

There are a few social issues that there isn't general agreement on, but those only seem to affect how libertarian voters feel for an election or two. After some statist behavior actually happens (healthcare reform, the Kelo decision, government surveillance, etc.), libertarians start to realize that conservatives align much better with their goals. At least, they're the lesser of two evils.

I think the problem here is that most people don't actually listen to other opinions on things. Since there is a lack of diversity in mainstream opinion shows, certain positions (libertarian, evangelical, etc.) tend to be only described in caricature. When evangelicals and libertarians start to talk about politics, there's actually a lot of agreement on big issues. Even when they disagree on the ends, they generally agree on the means (big changes should happen with a Constitutional amendment).

[timdellinger]

Politics is a bit of a different beast than business. Things that occur to me off-hand are:

- Political entities get large not to achieve economies of scale (i.e. increased efficiency and effectiveness, which may or may not materialize in business... thereby sowing the seeds of future fragmentation when they don't), but rather to achieve scale itself: more votes.

- There's been no de-regulation akin to what occurred in business in the 70s and 80s, mostly because the big parties literally write the rules.

- Elections are pretty much a zero-sum game.

[golergka]

> The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years. Proponents of extreme reform on the other side don't want to vote for a moderate candidate. A Trump vs Clinton election is going to leave too many people without a candidate and force the beginning of the end of the two party system.

Two-party system is awful in representing people's opinions, but it's much better at another task, that might be even more important — reaching minimal acceptable compromise. Also, you might be overlooking another danger of multi-party system: political force that significantly over-powers all competition. Once something like this appears and gets the power over government, it gets the positive feedback effect and very often becomes a beginning of authoritarian and un-democratic regime. US and UK two-party systems server as a natural safeguard against such a thing happening.

Really, selecting the best possible leader and making best possible decisions are not necessarily the main tasks of a democracy.