No, it is the opposite, David.
In the United States, we compete with voters for the win. Of the voters, and as a good example, 60% is represented. We play basketball and no surprise the average player is a lot taller than the average person.
In Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain, voters do not compete with voters for the win. 100%, as the best-possible example, is represented. It will be close to 100%. All sizes of people are represented.
Their representatives are on average five to ten years younger than our representatives because we cannot vote them out all that easily.
A color copier has red, blue, yellow and black ink to print any kind of color picture.
Our political system has just red and blue, with a strong emphasis on purple because the purple voters swing the outcome toward red or blue. Both parties will ponder to what purple wants, while today we see that particularly the Red Party is going nuclear (because the demographics are not in their favor).
Any person believing our system is more or less the way it should be -- with a few wishes that would make it really great -- is completely unaware that one of the primary colors is missing. Most likely, a choice was made for either good cop or for bad cop, and the attention is therefore set toward one side winning. The attention span is not about seeing the missing color.
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Yet the real travesty is that the Founding Fathers put the right wording in place, and that the powers that be at State levels robbed the voters of their access to Thomas Jefferson's clean voting system. We should have had it at State levels and we are fully entitled to getting it at the local levels.
That is the tragedy. The Founding Fathers (imperfect as they were), put the correct wording in place. When executed properly, we would have ended up with three to five important parties (and likely no additional little parties) and neither Red or Blue Machine would dictate our political landscape the way they are today.
Germany is more or less what the USA would end up like, and the funny part is that the USA helped Germany get its system. It is very much already the USA system anyways, but fixed up.
In the last 70 years, the Germans have had two-party coalitions only, not three or more party coalitions. Two parties working together makes it easier than three or more. Their total number of parties in Germany is six, if I am not mistaken.
The majority decision by these two coalition parties is a majority-supported decision by the voters. We do not have that, because we are already at that 60% of representation.
Let me not make this reply too long and quote someone who said it much better than I can.
"Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities."
—John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861
We can get Thomas Jefferson's voting system in place today because it is already set up that way in the US Constitution and this will change the political landscape dramatically because the voters will get (at the local level) between two to eight times more voter power than we have today.
Thank you for the conversation, David.
