A wonderful reply, Astoria Bob, and I am glad you want that better society. We deserve it.
Yet, like the Founding Fathers having looked wide and far and thinking things over, we have to acknowledge that proportional voting has one important downfall that we should not ignore.
Interbellum Germany is the largest nation ever to have had proportional voting and we know the results. These were crises years, and that is exactly what a good system must withstand.
One third of the Germans voted communist, one third of them voted fascist, and one third was split up in different ways for little parties in the center.
These little parties in the center realized they had to hand power over to one side (or the nation was going to fall apart, which in hindsight would have been okay with the rest of the world I think). Their examples were Mussolini in Italy and Stalin in Russia, so they picked the fascist route, giving Hitler his mandate.
That means we must prevent the United States from having twenty little parties. It would be criminal to set up the nation for failure and it would be criminal to set up the world for a United States out of control.
At the same time, the two parties are choking us. They are not behaving like parties in a democracy should behave.
Where in the past there may have been many politicians that embraced the We The People ideals, and who were voting accordingly, today we have a very selfish and competitive group of representatives that end up making their small decisions look like major and fantastic decisions. In general, very little comes out of their hands. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
So, we do need that third party and we do need that forth and perhaps even fifth party. But we should not have too many parties for they will tear this nation apart and that torn nation will start warring. That is in no one's interest.
The Founding Fathers set up the larger framework, and nothing else. While they allowed us to incorporate change, they made it close to impossible to redo the entire setup. We can tinker in the margin, have an amendment here and there, but a US Constitutional redo is not available. It would be the same as the problem the little German parties in the middle had and I see nothing good come out of it. More importantly, there is nothing wrong with the framework -- if only the innards were set up properly. Today, that's not the case.
Astoria Bob, I recognize the US already as a rather anarchistic nation. Because government is not able to organize itself well, people prefer to have less of it, not more.
Comparing this to less-anarchistic Western Europe, people trust their government a lot more because they themselves control their government much better.
We'll keep walking the line toward getting what the Founding Fathers told us is ours. We do need that third, fourth party, and perhaps that fifth party.
Thank you for your support : - )
