Should we "smash the two-party system"? This article in The Guardian suggests that the Brits should do so.....

[FadedMullet]

.......with theirs, and ours is even more dysfunctional and getting worse. I know any talk of reforming the Democratic Party stirs up a hormet's nest here on DU, but read this interesting article from a source that often makes a lot of sense.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/27/smash-britain-two-party-system-election-labour-reform?utm_term=6835e18786df20dd628a04b82874a285&utm_campaign=BestOfGuardianOpinionUK&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=opinionuk_email

[regnaD kciN]

1. It's easier to do that in a parliamentary system...

…because, after the election, you can build coalitions to choose a PM. Under our system, it just means the largest bloc (usually the one on the other side of the split) takes complete power.

[stillcool]

2. not in my state.

and it's already happened in the federal government.

[Ping Tung]

3. "Americans dreaded democracy and contrived their constitution against it." Lord Acton

See Electoral College for one prime example of anti-democracy.

[J_William_Ryan]

4. "...reforming the Democratic Party"

“Labour’s strategy is incomprehensible. Experience from the rest of Europe shows that when centrist parties adopt far-right rhetoric and policies, they empower the far right while shedding their own supporters.

What explains this idiocy? Labour has succumbed, quickly and hard, to the defining sickness of our undemocratic political system: the sofa cabinet system of close advisers. Opaque and unaccountable government favours opaque and unaccountable power. Ever receptive to the demands of rentiers, oligarchs, non-doms and corporations, Labour’s oh-so-clever strategists are moronically giftwrapping the country for Nigel Farage.”

This doesn’t track with Democrats in the US; indeed, this is what usually stirs up a hornet’s nest, the idea that Democrats must abandon their advocacy for the rights of gay and transgender Americans, the reproductive rights of women, and the due process rights of immigrants.

We hear rhetoric about Democrats losing because of their advocacy of such ‘fringe’ issues, alienating mainstream middle America.

‘Reforming’ the Democratic Party into a right-of-center party isn’t reform – it’s surrender.