[jfengel]

The large scale something is, the more a political party matters. At a school level you can be closely informed about all of the issues and know all of the players. You can barely do that at the level of city politics. State and federal politics simply doesn't allow it.

Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.

I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.