• theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I was taught that the founding fathers’ did not take into account a two-party political system when they designed the system of checks and balances.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      They did take it into account and George Washington himself said it was a terrible idea because it would lead to exactly where we are now.

      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        14 hours ago

        If by “take it into account” you mean they said “political parties sure are bad” then not implement anything into the system to discourage their formation, then proceed to form political parties themselves a decade or so later, then sure.

        • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          No, I just mean the traditional sense of “they understood it and thought about it enough to form an opinion on what might happen.”

          Most people disagreed with Washington, but they still took it into account.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Fuck those slavers.

      It is kind of just the endstate of democratic systems. If you need the populace to vote for you (whether directly or through representatives in a parliament or whatever), you inevitably end up down selecting based on key issues. Which means you get more and more coalitions based on, generally speaking, the French Revolution (i.e. Left and Right).

      The US is obviously ahead of the curve. But we are increasingly seeing coalitions between the political parties in Western Europe and so forth. Because they understand that splitting the vote between the three left leaning parties that disagree on the exact level of taxation or the priority queue is just a guaranteed loss once the other side has already stopped doing that.

      Ranked choice voting theoretically helps with this (and isn’t too dissimilar in impact to things like the party primaries in the US…) but it still ends up on 2-3 core mega-parties.