The USA, like France, has an empowered president. That is a dumb position. It is better to have a chancellor or prime-minister, and no president above.
Presidents split nations, prime ministers glue people together (when there is no president above but perhaps a paper administrative president).
Nations have had civil wars about presidential-election outcomes; never over a prime-minister’s electoral outcome (and again when no president above).
Any fool can already see that 'winner-take-all' is completely flawed.
Democracy is a government of people being represented by others.
Contrast this with winner-take-all where the majority of the voters dominate the minority of the voters by not giving any representation at all to the minority. The President is the victor, the others the defeated.
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Let’s have a closer look how winner-take-all is a bad system.
US Senators are voted in with support of 60% of the voters on average.
That means that 30% of the voters got their Democratic Senators, that 30% of the voters got their Republican Senators, and that the largest group of 40% of the voters went home empty-handed. They got nothing. That is not a system of representation, but a system of repression built-in to the system. How dumb is that? Not the majority, but 30% of the voters guide the direction of the nation. Our politicians don’t have to listen to us very well because they just need that 30% to claim their majority win.
Naturally, a large nation like France does not need twenty little parties. But a good color copier has red, blue, yellow and black ink, and a president is always just one of those colors. Each image printed out with the help of the President bleeds red, colors blue, or ends up being too yellow to be proud of.
France needs a better democracy. It may look at Germany where there is no President, and yet there are a limited number of parties. They have (of course) the most experience with voting systems (and the pure Proportional Voting system turned out to be a problem for large nations -- glad they fixed that for us after WW II).
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If we want to split nations, let's embrace winner-take-all and competition for the sake of competition. If you love division, it is the best.
But the Egyptian pyramid with a single position in top is truly not as smart as the Mexican pyramid with a platform in top where people from four different sides can reach the top platform with the best of their best, and then discuss with the other best of the best folks from the other directions how to move forward in our societies.
We can do it. But we have to remove the bad apples. The bad apples are not people; the bad apples are the bad systems.
