Not disagreeing too much, Bear, while I hope you allow me to make a double entendre about your simplistic and false remark:
It is simplistic to keep out the third view, but understandable when growing up in a two-party culture and political scientists in general not acknoweldging this.
Politically, the USA is a Mom & Dad culture (economically, it's actually quite diverse). The children can say whatever they want to say, but Mom & Dad will not allow them to emancipate and they must turn into Mom & Dad instead.
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The Founding Fathers never envisioned a two-party system, and they actually did not set up a two-party system.
It was the States that turned the USA into a two-party nation because they followed the Federal level in example instead of reading the fine print of the US Constitution.
The Founding Fathers concentrated powers x1, so we would be a strong nation standing firm against foreign enemies and extreme internal conflicts. Yet they were clearly of the mindset that on the inside of the bulwark we would be free people.
What happened instead was that the States rejected Thomas Jefferson's clean voting system and concentrated powers not just once more for State elections, but actually made it verboten to use Thomas Jefferson's voting system in city and county elections as well.
Instead of concentrating powers x1, for the Federal level, we have a concentration of powers x3 for Federal, State and local levels.
They did not want a single soul to have any experience anywhere anytime with the clean voting system because that would have undermined their powers. Folks would have seen right through their motives.
The States were so much engaged in keeping as much power for themselves in light of their struggle with the Federation's power that they did what they were told explicitly to not do: they disparaged/denied the rights retained by the People. Where we are told in many different ways that we are the Land of the Free, the State powers that be took actual US Constitutional freedoms away from us.
Had they followed the US Constitution, we would have had a four- or five-party system at the Federal level today, no need to change the US Constitution for that result.
So, this nation, almost from the start, lived a double life of reality on the books and reality as lived in real power struggles, denying the third party (the People) their US Constitutional say.
