After Trump’s acquittal: An External Solution to America’s Political Dysfunction

Analysts point to the asymmetry in US policy. Comparative studies place the Republican party on the far right of the western political spectrum and the Democrats closer to the center. But the escalating division within the United States added to the feeling of a zero-sum conflict, which can be seen in the sentiment and horror of the deadly January 6 attack. Trump may take some of the blame for the flammable atmosphere around Washington, but the problems run deeper, down to the old pillars of the American political experience. For Dortman, the experience and the violent codes of the Trump presidency underscored the need for fundamental political reform. . An angry, conspiratorial political genre supported by a minority of voters accounted for half of the two-party system. “We need a center-right party that believes in free, fair and legitimate elections,” Dortman told Today’s WorldView. “This party can only exist if the Republican Party splits into pieces.” Drutmann is not alone in this view. According to a Gallup poll conducted Monday, nearly 62 percent of Americans want a third-party appearance – the highest number since Gallup began asking a third party in 2003 – while only a third of Americans said they believe the current two parties are sufficiently representative. Audience: Of course, there is no consensus on what this viable third party should be and certainly no clear path to power. One can actually see American politics roughly split between four factions, with the rival progressive and middle wings of the Democrats on the one hand, and the Trumpian wings of the Republicans on the other. But the whole structure of the US electoral system dampens the political divide. The practice of electoral district manipulation, which sees state governments drawing districts in such a way as to skew the vote in favor of the ruling party, has made competitive elections more difficult, and as Dortman argues, pluralist democracy can only thrive in the United States at the top. New electoral system that allows more accurate reflection of voters. He is an advocate of the proportional representation voting forms found in many other countries, where elections allocate seats in the national legislature based on the vote share won by that particular party. Proportional representation, or proportional representation, voting varies in implementation from country to country, but the version that Dortman loves the most is Ireland’s combination of multi-seat districts and ranked voting, which allows voters to rank their preference for a list of candidates and helps ensure that each card Ballot has weight. There could be flaws – Israel’s stunning system of proportional representation has placed the country in its own perdition cycle in elections in recent years. But scholars tend to agree that it produces healthier democratic results. Pippa Norris, a professor of political science at Harvard University, writes, “Parliamentary democracies with the public relations elections and stable multi-party coalition governments, typical of the North, generate a broader consensus on welfare policies that address inequality, exclusion and social justice, which avoids the competing winner – take all Divisive politics and social inequality are more characteristic of majority systems. ”There are many other countries that also hold“ first-person ”elections, such as the United States. In Canada and Britain, calls for proportional representation routinely come from parties that win a much larger share of the total vote than their number of seats in Parliament reflects. But multiparty parliamentary systems can still produce the kind of conciliatory politics that is difficult to imagine in Washington’s current party climate. “Incentives to compromise or cooperate with political opponents are absent in a two-party system, winner takes all – while cooperation between opposing parties through coalition governments, the usual ruling arrangement in countries with proportional voting systems, promotes gentler and kinder policies,” noted political scientists Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horn. They added that “without reforming the basic features of the American electoral system, it is likely that party competition based on pluralism, and winner takes all, will continue to maintain political hostility.” In an intellectual exercise, Dortmann ventured into WorldView today – a scenario in which the United States had a semblance of a mixed German system, in which the Bundestag, or national parliament, is elected through a combination of proportional representation and plurality voting. The hard-line Trumpian wing of the Republicans in this situation will be closer to the extreme right-wing anti-establishment alternative, the alternative for Germany, or the alternative for Germany. “They will be a fringe, far-right party that will be removed from power, or at best a junior coalition partner,” said Drutmann. Instead, in the United States, the political system has practically enabled de facto minority rule, a situation that has led to volatile partisan divisions and distorted national policy priorities. In an opinion piece for The Washington Post last week, Dortman wrote that some of the proposed policy reforms around the vote would ultimately be in the interests of ordinary Republicans and would force them to stop “chasing a shrinking audience that is being mobilized by increasingly extremist threat rhetoric.” American democracy appears to be a daunting project, but Drortman argues that nothing in the constitution prevents fundamental election reforms. Statewide in a few places, ranked selection voting has actually been implemented. Democrats are pushing a major bill, called a Law for the People, that would standardize election-related rules, create independent state redistricting committees, make automatic voter registration and campaign financing more transparent, among other provisions. And there is another legislation introduced by Representative Don Baer (Democrat from Virginia) that would transform the House of Representatives into a chamber elected by new multi-seat districts with a choice of voting. , Scrapped her first-of-its-kind model for a form of proportional representation in 1993 – and never looked back. “It’s one of those issues that once you think about it for a while, it makes sense,” he said. “But we don’t think about that.”