The US needs 4 political parties
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 US elections, Ed Pilkington of The Guardian suggested that US democracy was failing in five key areas: voter suppression, the structure of the Senate, redistricting, the appointment of judges and of course, the electoral college.
There's another structural element that contributes to the US being a flawed democracy - the 2-party system. There's obviously no legal mandate for this and other political parties do exist, but they are irrelevant.
Multiple political parties are common across the democratic world.
In the first round of presidential elections in France last Sunday, there was a bewildering array of candidates, including communists, socialists, greens, centrists, centre-right, right wingers and extreme right wingers.
The political spectrum in the US includes all of the above - other than died-in-the-wool communists perhaps. However, all of them, other than the irrelevant fringe, are shoehorned into just two political parties.
This no longer works.
The Republican party has been captured by its far-right, with it having become necessary to play to the galleries with progressively extreme positions, at the cost of traditional Republican values. For the Democrats, the politics of its far-left become the stick to beat the party with, with tags of "commie' and "red" attaching to even fairly conservative, centrist Democrats, to the detriment of the whole party.
Partisanship and bitter division reign as a result.
The US needs at least 4 parties - far-left, far-right, left-of-centre and right-of-centre. Potential benefits? Voters and lawmakers will be able to vote their principles and parties will be less likely to be captured by their extreme fringes. Coalitions will form, in and out of government, and more compromise will be possible on non-core issues.
Pipe dream? Perhaps. But this may be a way out of the strange direction that US politics has taken.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/16/america-flawed-democracy-five-key-areas